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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 crew, which lately 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 velocity 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 targets. Amazon stated it’s notably excited concerning the work in combining massive 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 nearly all of the crew 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 accordance with GeekWire.
When the Adept crew 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 crew might 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 might be working carefully with Luan on the challenge, the corporate informed TechCrunch. Abbeel got here to Amazon in an analogous method because the Adept crew. 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 thousands and thousands of picks from Covariant robots in warehouses around the globe, the Covariant Mind allows robots to autonomously choose many SKUs.
The lab is trying rent a couple of dozen individuals — not simply AI consultants who’ve educated state-of-the-art fashions but additionally candidates from different disciplines who will carry contemporary pondering to the sector, akin to physics, math, or quantitative finance, no matter expertise stage. candidates can attain out by way of AGI-SFLab-Jobs@amazon.com.