David Luan, Amazon’s AI Lab lead, who joined after his co-founded startup Adept was acquired by the retail large is leaving his place as the corporate’s Vice President, Brokers and Head of the San Francisco synthetic intelligence lab, simply two years later. He made the announcement in a put up on skilled social networking platform LinkedIn, earlier at the moment.
“I’ll be leaving Amazon on the finish of this week to cook dinner up one thing new,” Luan wrote, including: “Because of the Adept deal, I’ve spent the final ~2 years studying from Andy Jassy, Peter Desantis, Matt Garman, and Rohit Prasad whereas main Amazon’s brokers R&D effort and our San Francisco AI lab. As a childhood AWS fanboy, it was unbelievable to speedrun launching our personal tier-1 AWS service.”
David Luan’s achievements in AI for Amazon
Itemizing out the assorted targets achieved at Amazon, Luan mentioned that the AI lab “scaled up the agent coaching recipes we invented at Adept, did new RL analysis, and put the tech within the palms of AWS clients like Hertz, 1Password, and Amazon.com itself”.
He additionally introduced that Peter Desantis, SVP of utility computing merchandise at AWS who has spent 27 years on the large, will take over his function: “Because the underdog, seeing Nova Act on the high of agent analysis leaderboards like REALBench is kind of satisfying. The staff shall be in nice palms with Peter Desantis from right here.”
Why did David Luan depart Amazon?
Luan in his put up defined that whereas there may be “unbelievable work to be executed at Amazon and alternatives for me to tackle extra areas”, he believes that with AGI “so shut”, focusing “100% of my time on educating AI techniques model new capabilities” is essential.
“This wasn’t a straightforward choice, and I am unhappy to depart this glorious staff. I’m grateful for the belief our execs positioned in me throughout an essential second for Amazon and the sphere. I am excited to swing on the subsequent concept!” he added.
Who’s David Luan? All we find out about Adept cofounder
Luan is the top of Amazon’s Brokers and AI lab groups based mostly in San Francisco, which was created in December 2024 to work on long-term analysis bets. He joined the retail and tech main in 2024, together with the founding staff of Adept, by Amazon’s acquisition of the AI startup, CNBC reported.
Among the many lab’s merchandise embody Nova Act agent, unveiled in March 2025, which competes with ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), and Gemini (Google). It’s an AI mannequin and developer toolkit for constructing brokers that may carry out duties autonomously in net browsers, as per a Geekwire report.
Previous to Amazon (joined June 2024) and Adept (January 2022-December 2024, Luan’s LinkedIn profile exhibits he his different main roles have been:
- On the Influence Advisory Committee at Apollo International Administration (January 2021-December 2022);
- A Director at Google Analysis (September 2020-November 2021);
- VP of Engineering at OpenAI (December 2017-September 2020);
- Director of AI at Axion (February 2017-November 2017);
- And CEO of Dextro (October 2011-November 2017).
In keeping with his web site, Luan holds “a certificates in CS from Worcester State from once I was 12, and a BS/BA in Utilized Math and Political Science from Yale”.
His most important focus is analysis, however his profession “has revolved round near- and long-term impacts of AI on society”, it added. “I am taken with how the dynamics of AI growth can form outcomes for folks, and I attempt to spend as a lot time as attainable with ethics, security, and coverage researchers,” it mentioned.
David Luan joins different Adept co-founders in leaving Amazon
Notably, his departure comes after Amazon introduced main reorganisation of its AGI division, into its AWS Cloud division final yr, CNBC added.
Spokespeople for Amazon declined to remark, based on the report.
The Geekwire report additional famous that Luan shouldn’t be the primary Adept co-founder who joined Amazon beneath the so-called “acqui-deal” to depart. Different co-founders have additionally moved to totally different roles throughout the trade:
- Erich Elsen resigned after 4 months and is now a principal analysis scientist at Databricks.
- Augustus Odena and Maxwell Nye each left after a couple of yr and are actually analysis scientists at Meta.
Earlier than founding Adept in 2022, Luan ran analysis and engineering at OpenAI for 3 years and led Google’s giant language mannequin effort. In his departure put up, he described his profession as a collection of early bets, together with incubating the primary GPTs at OpenAI, and going all-in on brokers at Adept earlier than others.