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Left to proper: David Luan, VP of autonomy and head of Amazon’s AGI SF Lab, and Pieter Abbeel, Amazon Scholar, robotics. | Supply: Amazon
Amazon is forming a brand new lab in San Francisco, referred to as the Amazon AGI SF Lab, to develop new foundational capabilities for enabling helpful AI within the digital and bodily worlds. The brand new lab’s work will construct on that of the firm’s broader AGI group, which not too long ago launched Amazon Nova, a brand new era of state-of-the-art basis fashions (FMs).
Amazon stated the AGI SF Lab is designed to empower AI researchers and engineers to make main breakthroughs with pace and focus. It stated the lab’s preliminary focus is on a number of key analysis bets that can allow AI to carry out real-world actions, study from human suggestions, self-course-correct, and infer the lab’s objectives. Amazon stated it’s notably excited in regards to the work in combining giant language fashions (LLMs) with reinforcement studying (RL) to unravel reasoning and planning, discovered world fashions, and generalizing AI brokers to bodily environments.
The announcement of the AGI SF Lab comes on the heels of a barrage of AI-related bulletins Amazon made final week throughout its re:Invent 2025 occasion. The information included that Amazon doubled its funding in AI startup Anthropic to $8 billion, launched the Trainium2 chip constructed for the heavy computing calls for of AI, and launched six foundational LLMs underneath its Nova umbrella.
Amazon brings assist from Adept, Covariant hires
Amazon introduced in June 2024 it employed the vast majority of the group behind Adept, a startup that aimed to make use of AI to automate software program processes. The corporate raised round $400 million for its expertise, earlier than Amazon employed round 66% of its workers, in response to GeekWire.
When the Adept group joined Amazon, the corporate stated it deliberate to license Adept’s expertise to speed up its roadmap for constructing AI to automate software program workflows. Now, this group will probably be seeding the brand new lab. The AGI SF Lab will leverage Adept’s work in constructing AI brokers that may deal with advanced workflows utilizing the identical instruments we use as people, like computer systems, net browsers, and code interpreters.
David Luan, co-founder of Adept, will lead the brand new lab. He’ll have some assist from Pieter Abbeel, co-founder of Covariant, who will probably be working carefully with Luan on the venture, the corporate instructed TechCrunch. Abbeel got here to Amazon in an analogous means because the Adept group. In August 2024, Amazon employed Covariant’s founders and round 25% of its workers and signed a non-exclusive license to make use of the corporate’s robotic basis fashions.
Covariant develops what it calls a “common AI platform” referred to as the Covariant Mind. Pre-trained on tens of millions of picks from Covariant robots in warehouses world wide, the Covariant Mind allows robots to autonomously decide many SKUs.
The lab is trying rent a number of dozen individuals — not simply AI specialists who’ve educated state-of-the-art fashions but in addition candidates from different disciplines who will deliver contemporary pondering to the sphere, comparable to physics, math, or quantitative finance, no matter expertise degree. candidates can attain out through AGI-SFLab-Jobs@amazon.com.
