Hello, and welcome to Decoder! This is Alex Heath, your Thursday episode guest host and deputy editor at The Verge. One of the biggest topics in AI these days is agents — the idea that AI is going to move from chatbots to reliably completing tasks for us in the real world. But the problem with agents is that they really aren’t all that reliable right now.
There’s a lot of work happening in the AI industry to try to fix that, and that brings me to my guest today: David Luan, the head of Amazon’s AGI research lab. I’ve been wanting to chat with David for a long time. He was an early research leader at OpenAI, where he helped drive the development of GPT-2, GPT-3, and DALL-E. After OpenAI, he cofounded Adept, an AI research lab focused on agents. And last summer, he left Adept to join Amazon, where he now leads the company’s AGI lab in San Francisco.
We recorded this episode right after the release of OpenAI’s GPT-5, which gave us an opportunity to talk about why he thinks progress on AI models has slowed. The work that David’s team is doing is a big priority for Amazon, and this is the first time I’ve heard him really lay out what he’s been up to.
I also had to ask him about how he joined Amazon. David’s decision to leave Adept was one of the first of many deals I call reverse acquihire, in which a Big Tech company all-but-actually buys a buzzy AI startup to avoid antitrust scrutiny. I don’t want to spoil too much, but let’s just say that David left the startup world for Big Tech last year because he says he knew where the AI race was headed. I think that makes his predictions for what’s coming next worth listening to.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
David, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me on. I’m really excited to be here.
It’s great to have you. We have a lot to talk about. I’m super interested in what you and your team are up to at Amazon these days. But first, I think the audience could really benefit from hearing a little bit about you and your history, and how you got to Amazon, because you’ve been in the AI space for a long time, and you’ve had a pretty interesting career leading up to this. Could you walk us through a little bit of your background in AI and how you ended up at Amazon?
First off, I find it absolutely hilarious that anyone would say I’ve been around the field for a long time. It’s true in relative terms, because this field is so new, and yet, nonetheless, I’ve only been doing AI stuff for about the last 15 years. So compared with many other fields, it’s not that long.
Well, 15 years is an eternity in AI years.
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