David Luan, Amazon’s AI Lab lead, who joined after his co-founded startup Adept was acquired by the retail giant is leaving his position as the company’s Vice President, Agents and Head of the San Francisco artificial intelligence lab, just two years later. He made the announcement in a post on professional social networking platform LinkedIn, earlier today.
“I’ll be leaving Amazon at the end of this week to cook up something new,” Luan wrote, adding: “Thanks to the Adept deal, I’ve spent the last ~2 years learning from Andy Jassy, Peter Desantis, Matt Garman, and Rohit Prasad while leading Amazon’s agents R&D effort and our San Francisco AI lab. As a childhood AWS fanboy, it was incredible to speedrun launching our own tier-1 AWS service.”
David Luan’s achievements in AI for Amazon
Listing out the various goals achieved at Amazon, Luan said that the AI lab “scaled up the agent training recipes we invented at Adept, did new RL research, and put the tech in the hands of AWS customers like Hertz, 1Password, and Amazon.com itself”.
He also announced that Peter Desantis, SVP of utility computing products at AWS who has spent 27 years at the giant, will take over his role: “As the underdog, seeing Nova Act at the top of agent research leaderboards like REALBench is quite satisfying. The team will be in great hands with Peter Desantis from here.”
Why did David Luan leave Amazon?
Luan in his post explained that while there is “incredible work to be done at Amazon and opportunities for me to take on more areas”, he believes that with AGI “so close”, focusing “100% of my time on teaching AI systems brand new capabilities” is important.
“This wasn’t an easy decision, and I’m sad to leave this wonderful team. I’m grateful for the trust our execs placed in me during an important moment for Amazon and the field. I’m excited to swing at the next idea!” he added.
Who is David Luan? All we know about Adept cofounder
Luan is the head of Amazon’s Agents and AI lab teams based in San Francisco, which was created in December 2024 to work on long-term research bets. He joined the retail and tech major in 2024, along with the founding team of Adept, through Amazon’s acquisition of the AI startup, CNBC reported.
Among the lab’s products include Nova Act agent, unveiled in March 2025, which competes with ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), and Gemini (Google). It is an AI model and developer toolkit for building agents that can perform tasks autonomously in web browsers, as per a Geekwire report.
Prior to Amazon (joined June 2024) and Adept (January 2022-December 2024, Luan’s LinkedIn profile shows he his other major roles were:
- On the Impact Advisory Committee at Apollo Global Management (January 2021-December 2022);
- A Director at Google Research (September 2020-November 2021);
- VP of Engineering at OpenAI (December 2017-September 2020);
- Director of AI at Axion (February 2017-November 2017);
- And CEO of Dextro (October 2011-November 2017).
According to his website, Luan holds “a certificate in CS from Worcester State from when I was 12, and a BS/BA in Applied Math and Political Science from Yale”.
His main focus is research, but his career “has revolved around near- and long-term impacts of AI on society”, it added. “I’m interested in how the dynamics of AI development can shape outcomes for people, and I try to spend as much time as possible with ethics, safety, and policy researchers,” it said.
David Luan joins other Adept co-founders in leaving Amazon
Notably, his departure comes after Amazon announced major reorganisation of its AGI division, into its AWS Cloud division last year, CNBC added. It also led to Indian-American Rohit Prasad, who previously led the AI efforts and helped build the Alexa voice assistant, stepping down at year’s end.
Spokespeople for Amazon declined to comment, according to the report.
The Geekwire report further noted that Luan is not the first Adept co-founder who joined Amazon under the so-called “acqui-deal” to leave. Other co-founders have also moved to different roles across the industry:
- Erich Elsen resigned after four months and is now a principal research scientist at Databricks.
- Augustus Odena and Maxwell Nye both left after about a year and are now research scientists at Meta.
Before founding Adept in 2022, Luan ran research and engineering at OpenAI for three years and led Google’s large language model effort. In his departure post, he described his career as a series of early bets, including incubating the first GPTs at OpenAI, and going all-in on agents at Adept before others.
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