Adept 10亿美元“AI队友”豪赌，最终以亚马逊2024年6月收购团队告终

做的是什么生意

Adept trained action models — AI that operates software the way a human does, through clicks, keystrokes and scrolling. Its ACT-1 prototype showed an overlay controlling Chrome, Salesforce and other tools from natural-language instructions.

启动资金：Over $415M raised: $65M Series A (Apr 2022) and $350M Series B (Mar 2023) at ~$1B valuation

起因

Founded Jan 5, 2022 in San Francisco by David Luan (ex-OpenAI VP of Engineering) with co-founders including transformer-paper co-authors Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar. Its thesis: language models were impressive but passive; the next step was 'useful general intelligence' that does anything a human can do at a computer (AI Wiki).

经过

Adept showed ACT-1 in Sept 2022 and raised a $350M Series B in March 2023 at roughly $1B with strategic investors Microsoft, Nvidia, Atlassian and Workday, while keeping only ~25 employees (TechCrunch). It open-sourced Persimmon-8B and Fuyu-8B, then built an enterprise workflows product. But Vaswani and Parmar had left in 2023 to found Essential AI, and the startup 'struggled to bring any product to market despite months and months of testing' (TechCrunch, June 2024).

结果

On June 28, 2024 Amazon hired CEO David Luan, several co-founders and roughly two-thirds of Adept's ~100 staff, and licensed its tech for a reported ~$25M — a 'reverse acqui-hire' Reuters compared to Microsoft's Inflection deal, with FTC scrutiny. A ~20-person remnant under new CEO Zach Brock kept the company alive on paper, but the original venture — its own foundation models and agent product — was over (TechCrunch; Reuters; AI Wiki).

可借鉴之处

再动听的AI理念和独角兽估值也造不出产品；当云巨头为人才和技术提供退出通道，创始人抓住机会，创业公司一夜被掏空。