Amazon's AGI lab leader David Luan exits after two years to focus on teaching AI new capabilities

David Luan Announces Departure from Amazon's AGI Lab

David Luan, head of Amazon's AGI lab, is leaving the company after less than two years, announcing his exit in a LinkedIn post on Tuesday. The former Adept CEO stated he will depart at the end of the week "to cook up something new," explaining that "with AGI so close, I decided to spend 100% of my time on teaching AI systems brand new capabilities."1

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The David Luan departure represents a significant loss for Amazon as the company struggles to keep pace in the AI race, with even its own employees reportedly calling its in-house AI products "Amazon Basics."1

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Adept Acqui-Hire Deal Unravels as Four of Five Co-Founders Exit

The exit marks a troubling pattern for Amazon's high-profile Adept acqui-hire deal. With Luan's departure, four of the five Adept co-founders who joined Amazon in June 2024 have now left the company, according to a review of LinkedIn profiles.3

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Erich Elsen departed after just four months and is now a principal research scientist at Databricks, while Augustus Odena and Maxwell Nye both left after about a year and are now research scientists at Meta.3

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Only Kelsey Szot remains at the company on the AGI team.3

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These AI acqui-hire deals have drawn scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission, with Chairman Andrew Ferguson stating in January that his agency would review such arrangements to determine whether tech companies are attempting to evade regulatory reviews.2

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Nova Act AI Agent Achievements and Amazon's San Francisco AI Lab

During his tenure, Luan led Amazon's San Francisco AI lab and oversaw development of the Nova Act AI agent, which launched as a research preview in March 2025.1

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The agent technology enables autonomous task completion in web browsers, including conducting web searches, making purchases, and answering questions.1

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Luan noted that Nova Act had been adopted by customers including Hertz, 1Password, and Amazon.com itself, and had reached the top of the REALBench agent research leaderboard.3

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"As the underdog, seeing Nova Act at the top of agent research leaderboards like REALBench is quite satisfying," Luan stated.4

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The Nova AI models represent Amazon's effort to compete with leading AI systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini.2

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Peter DeSantis Takes Control as Amazon Reorganizes AI Efforts

Amazon tapped Luan in December 2024 to oversee its newly created AGI lab, based in San Francisco and focused on "long-term research bets" including developing "useful AI agents."2

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However, Amazon announced a major reorganization of its AGI division late last year, bringing it under Peter DeSantis, a 27-year veteran of the company and senior vice president in its cloud unit.2

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Luan wrote that the team "will be in great hands" with DeSantis.3

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The restructuring signals Amazon's attempt to better integrate its AI research with AWS, its cloud computing division that competes against Microsoft and Google.3

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Former OpenAI and Google Executive's AI Career Trajectory

Before founding Adept in January 2022, Luan ran research and engineering at OpenAI for three years, where he was "lucky to incubate the first GPTs," and led Google's large language model effort.4

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His career has revolved around early bets on AI capabilities, and he noted that "at Adept, we went all-in on agents before anyone else -- our tech/people now drive computer-use efforts at every major lab."3

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Luan's statement that AGI is "so close" and his focus on teaching AI systems brand new capabilities suggests he believes the next breakthrough in artificial intelligence is imminent, prompting his decision to pursue independent research rather than remain within Amazon's corporate structure. Amazon has separately invested up to $8 billion in Anthropic and offers third-party AI models alongside its Nova family through AWS.3

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The company generated total sales of $213 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 14 percent year over year, and CEO Andy Jassy announced plans to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026.4

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Despite these investments, the loss of AI talent like Luan raises questions about Amazon's ability to retain top researchers as competition intensifies in the AI race.