Amazon announced setting up a new artificial intelligence (AI) laboratory on Monday. Dubbed Amazon AGI SF Lab, the new research lab will be based in San Francisco and focus on developing AI agents with real-world applications. The Seattle-based tech recently hired several top executives from the startup Adept AI Labs and will be seeding the new division with the new hires. Additionally, the Amazon AGI SF Lab will be headed by the former CEO and Co-founder of Adept, David Luam.
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Amazon Establishes Amazon AGI SF Lab
In a blog post, the tech giant stated that the new research unit will be focusing on developing foundational capabilities for AI agents that can take action in both digital as well as physical worlds. Notably, AI agents can be understood as smaller and more efficient AI chatbots that can also execute actions by integrating with specialised hardware and software.
Amazon highlighted that the team’s responsibility will include building “practical AI” that can perform tasks for the company as well as its clients. As the division’s name suggests, the team will also work closely with Amazon’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) team, which recently introduced the Nova family of foundational models.
“Our initial focus is on several key research bets that will enable AI agents to perform real-world actions, learn from human feedback, self-course-correct, and infer our goals,” the company stated in the blog post. Amazon also highlighted that the team will combine large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) to solve reasoning and planning, learned world models, and generalising agents to physical environments.
Amazon also announced that it is looking to hire “a few dozen” people for the Amazon AGI SF Lab. The company is looking for AI experts who have trained state-of-the-art (SOTA) models as well as candidates from other fields such as physics, mathematics, quantitative finance, and others. The blog post also added that experience level is not a criterion for hiring.
Last week, Amazon Web Services (AWS) introduced the Nova family of artificial intelligence (AI) models at its re:Invent conference, with three text-based models, one image generation model, and a video generation model. All of these models are available for the company’s enterprise clients and can be availed from the Amazon Bedrock platform.
