Amazon is betting on agents to win the AI race

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, or the idea that AI is going to move from chatbots to reliably doing things for us in the real world. The problem with agents right now is that they aren't really that reliable at all. There's a lot of work happening to fix that, which brings me to today's guest, 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, 3, and Dali. After OpenAI, he co-founded Adept, a 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 GPT-5, which gave us an opportunity to talk about why he thinks progress on AI models is slowing down. The work that David's team is doing is a big priority for Amazon, and this was the first time I've heard him really lay out what he's up to. I also had to ask him about how he joined Amazon. His leaving adept was one of the first of many deals that I call the reverse aqua hire, where a big tech company all but actually buys a buzzy AI startup to avoid antitrust scrutiny.

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