After less than two years at Amazon, David Luan, the head of Amazon’s San Francisco AI lab, is leaving the company. Luan announces update In a post on LinkedIn “I’ll be leaving Amazon at the end of this week to build something new,” he said Tuesday. He added, “There is incredible work to be done at Amazon and opportunities for me to work in more areas. But being so close to AGI, I decided to spend 100% of my time teaching AI systems brand new capabilities.”
The loss of a top AI developer at Amazon comes as the company struggles to stay in the AI race; Even its own employees are reportedly calling its in-house AI products “Amazon Basics.” Just a few weeks ago, Amazon launched its revamped AI assistant Alexa Plus to all users in the US, although some early users have said they would prefer to stick with the original Alexa.
Luan joined Amazon in 2024 along with other employees from his startup, Adept, which was developing AI agent technology that Amazon licensed. While at Amazon, Luan worked on their Nova AI models, including the Nova Act AI agent, which launched as a research preview in March. Act can complete web searches, make purchases, and answer questions, and Amazon said at the time of its launch that Act was already in use in Alexa Plus.
