Amazon AI Lab Head, Nova Act Creator And Former OpenAI Exec Departs

Amazon’s artificial general intelligence lab and top agentic AI researcher, David Luan, is leaving the tech giant after less than two years. Luan is the former CEO of Adept AI Labs and a former top OpenAI executive.

The head of Amazon’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) Lab and agentic AI R&D, David Luan, is departing after less than two years following Amazon hiring Luan and his team from Adept AI Labs.

Amazon’s AGI Lab recently released Amazon’s Nova Act agent, which competes against AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude.

“As the underdog, seeing Nova Act at the top of agent research leaderboards like REALBench is quite satisfying,” said Luan on LinkedIn announcing his departure from Amazon.

Luan is also the former director of engineering for OpenAI and helped create GPT, the company’s blockbuster AI technology

“At OpenAI, I was lucky to incubate the first GPTs,” Luan said on LinkedIn.

Amazon’s AGI Lab consists of researchers, engineers, designers and product innovators who focus on building useful AI agents operating across San Francisco and Boston. The group has a focus on long-term AI research innovation.

“As a childhood AWS fanboy, it was incredible to speedrun launching our own tier-1 AWS service. We 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,” Luan said.

“I’ll be leaving Amazon at the end of this week to cook up something new,” he said.

Amazon Hires Adept Leaders

Amazon hired former Adept CEO Luan along with other Adept co-founders including Augustus Odena, Kelsey Szot, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen and other employees in June 2024.

“At Adept, we went all-in on agents before anyone else—our tech/people now drive computer-use efforts at every major lab,” Luan said.

In addition, Amazon began licensing Adept technology at the time, including AI models and datasets.

“Thanks to the Adept deal, I’ve spent the last ~2 years learning from [Amazon CEO] Andy Jassy, [AWS CEO] Matt Garman, [AWS Senior Vice President] Peter Desantis and [Amazon AI Head Scientist] Rohit Prasad while leading Amazon’s agents R&D effort and our San Francisco AI lab,” said Luan on LinkedIn.

In late 2025, Amazon unveiled a major reorganization of its AGI division to bring it under Amazon and AWS veteran DeSantis.

“The team will be in great hands with Peter DeSantis from here,” Luan said.

Amazon AI Head Worked At OpenAI, Adept And Google

Luan was a founding team member and CEO of San Francisco-based Adept AI Labs before joining Amazon.

Adept is an AI research and product company specializing in agentic AI models.

Prior to Adept, Luan was a director in Google’s research division for over a year, leading Google’s large language model (LLM) efforts.

Before Google, Luan was director of engineering for OpenAI for several years.

Other IT executive roles held by Luan over the years include CEO of deep learning company Dextro, as well as director of AI for machine learning research firm Axon.

“This wasn’t an easy decision, and I’m sad to leave this wonderful team,” Luan said. “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!”

Amazon’s $200 Billion Investment And $852 Billion Run Rate

Amazon generated total sales of $213 billion in the fourth quarter of 2025, up 14 percent year over year, while the company’s operating income increased to $25 billion.

The Seattle-based company is now at an $852 billion annual run rate.

“With such strong demand for our existing offerings and seminal opportunities like AI, chips, robotics, and low earth orbit satellites, we expect to invest about $200 billion in capital expenditures across Amazon in 2026, and anticipate strong long-term return on invested capital,” said Amazon CEO Jassy during Amazon’s fourth-quarter earnings call.