AI Edition - It's AI Time - 80 [03-07-2024]

AI Edition - It's AI Time - 80

Amazon hires team from AI agent startup Adept

Amazon hired more than half the employees working at AI startup Adept, including its CEO and cofounder David Luan. Adept had been one of a clutch of startups trying to use LLMs to build a successful AI agent that could use business software to automate tasks such as building and analyzing spreadsheets and creating sophisticated slide decks. The deal was structured similarly to Microsoft’s non-acquisition earlier this year of AI startup Inflection, with most of the staff being hired but the Big Tech company making a large, lump sum payment to the remaining startup to license its technology (and make its investors, which had pumped at least $400 million into Adept to date, whole). The deals have been seen as a possible way to escape antitrust issues, although antitrust authorities are still probing the Microsoft-Inflection arrangement. Amazon says the Adept team will contribute to its own “AGI Autonomy” effort, which is thought to be working on agent-like AI for Amazon to both sell through its AWS cloud service and to use to power a new, more agent-like Alexa personal assistant and perhaps other AI agents too.

In Los Angeles, an AI chatbot for students falls flat
The city had paid an AI startup called AllHere $6 million to develop an AI chatbot called Ed that could serve as a personal tutor and educational assistant for the 500,000 students in the LA public school system. But months after winning the contract, AllHere’s chief executive and founder left the company and it furloughed most of its staff, the New York Times reported. AllHere delivered a version of Ed that was tested with 14-year-olds but was then taken offline for further refinement that might not happen now that AllHere has all but ceased operating. The school district has said it still hopes to have the chatbot widely available in September. Meanwhile, it has been left with a website AllHere built that simply collates information from other ed tech apps the district uses and doesn’t have the interactivity of a chatbot.

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