There’s a lot of work happening in the AI industry to try to fix that, and that brings me to my guest today: 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, GPT-3, and DALL-E. After OpenAI, he cofounded Adept, an AI 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 OpenAI’s GPT-5, which gave us an opportunity to talk about why he thinks progress on AI models has slowed. The work that David’s team is doing is a big priority for Amazon, and this is the first time I’ve heard him really lay out what he’s been up to. I also had to ask him about how he joined Amazon. David’s decision to leave Adept was one of the first of many deals I call reverse acquihire, in which a Big Tech company all-but-actually buys a buzzy AI startup to avoid antitrust scrutiny.

Full podcast : Amazon AGI Labs chief David Luan thinks solving agents is the next ‘S-curve’ for AI.