Head of Amazon's AGI lab leaves the company

When one of the leading artificial intelligence researchers leaves a technology giant with words that AGI is "so close," it deserves attention. This is exactly how David Luan, who headed Amazon's AGI lab in San Francisco, explained his decision to leave the company—after less than two years. On Tuesday, he posted on LinkedIn announcing his departure at the end of the week to "prepare something new."

Luan is a notable figure in the world of AI research. Before joining Amazon, he held leadership positions at several AI startups and was known as a specialist capable of building research teams from scratch. Amazon recruited him specifically to strengthen its position in the race for advanced language models and, more broadly, in artificial general intelligence. The San Francisco lab was supposed to become one of the key centers for this work, competing for talent with OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic, whose offices are located practically nearby.

However, the language Luan chose for his farewell post speaks volumes. He emphasized that Amazon has "incredible work and opportunities to take on more directions," but immediately added that he preferred to "devote one hundred percent of my time to training AI systems in entirely new capabilities." Between the lines, one reads dissatisfaction with the pace or direction of work within the corporation. When a researcher of his caliber says he wants to "prepare something new" outside a company with virtually unlimited resources, it's a signal of systemic problems.

And these problems, apparently, truly exist. According to The Verge, the situation inside Amazon with AI products is far from ideal—the company's own employees, according to leaks, call in-house AI developments uncompetitive. Alexa, once a revolutionary voice assistant, has failed to make a qualitative leap into the era of large language models. The Nova family of models, which Amazon presented as part of the Bedrock platform, has not yet generated the enthusiasm that accompanies releases from OpenAI or Google. Even Amazon's strategic investments in Anthropic totaling up to 4 billion dollars look more like an acknowledgment of its own limitations than a demonstration of strength.

The context of Luan's departure is important also because it reflects a broader trend. Large technology corporations increasingly lose the competition for elite AI researchers. The best specialists prefer either startups where they can move faster and not depend on corporate bureaucracy, or they create their own companies. Over the past year, we have seen a wave of such transitions: leading scientists have left Google, Meta, and Microsoft to launch their own projects. Amazon, already considered an outsider in the big AI race among FAANG companies, can afford such losses the least.

Luan's statement that AGI is "so close" deserves special attention. Among researchers, there is no consensus on the timeline for achieving artificial general intelligence—estimates range from several years to several decades. But when a practicing laboratory director, rather than a marketer or venture investor, makes such a statement, it at least suggests that something on the frontier of research is happening that inspires serious optimism. The question is whether Luan saw enough ambition and resources within Amazon for this leap forward—and the answer, judging by his decision, is negative.

What exactly Luan will "prepare" remains unknown. The phrasing hints at launching his own startup, though a move to one of the leading AI labs is not ruled out. In any case, for Amazon this is a painful loss. The company of Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy finds itself in a paradoxical situation: possessing one of the world's largest cloud infrastructures through AWS, colossal computing power, and enormous financial resources, it cannot retain the people who should turn all this into breakthrough AI products. Money and servers, as it turns out, cannot replace a culture in which researchers feel they are moving toward AGI at maximum speed.

For the entire industry, Luan's departure is yet another confirmation that the center of gravity in AI research continues to shift from large corporations to more flexible structures. And if Amazon does not find a way to reverse this trend, no billions of investments in Anthropic will help the company take a place in the front row of the new technological era.