Who is David Luan — Amazon’s AI Lab lead who joined after startup Adept was acquired by retail giant, is now leaving?
Amazon’s AI Lab leader David Luan is stepping down after just two years as the company’s Vice President, Representatives and President of the San Francisco AI lab, following the acquisition of Adept, the startup he co-founded, by the retail giant. 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 pursue something new,” Luan wrote. “Thanks to the Adept deal, I’ve spent the last nearly 2 years learning from Andy Jassy, Peter Desantis, Matt Garman, and Rohit Prasad, while also leading the R&D efforts of Amazon’s reps and our San Francisco AI lab. As a childhood AWS fan, it’s been incredible to quickly launch our own tier 1 AWS service.”
David Luan’s achievements in artificial intelligence for Amazon
Listing various goals achieved at Amazon, Luan said the AI lab is “amplifying the agent training recipes we invented at Adept, conducting new RL research, and putting the technology into the hands of AWS customers like Hertz, 1Password, and Amazon.com.”
He also announced that AWS SVP of utility computing products Peter Desantis, who spent 27 years at the giant, will take over the role: “As an underdog, it’s very satisfying to see Nova Act at the top of agent investigation leaderboards like REALBench. The team will be in good hands from here with Peter Desantis.”
Why did David Luan leave Amazon?
Luan explained in her post that while there is “incredible work to be done at Amazon and opportunities for me to take on roles in more areas,” she believes it is important to focus “100% of my time on teaching brand new capabilities to AI systems” because AGI is “just around the corner.”
“This wasn’t an easy decision, and I’m sad to be leaving this great team. I’m grateful for the trust our executives have placed in me at a pivotal moment for Amazon and the field. I’m excited to move on to the next idea!” he added.
Who is David Luan? Everything we know about the Adept co-founder
Luan is the head of the San Francisco-based Amazon Agents and AI lab teams, which were created in December 2024 to work on long-term research bets. He joined the retail and technology division along with Adept’s founding team in 2024, after Amazon acquired the AI startup, CNBC reported.
The lab’s products include the Nova Act agent, which was introduced in March 2025 and competes with ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), and Gemini (Google). According to a Geekwire report, it is an AI model and developer toolset for build agents that can perform tasks independently in web browsers.
Prior to Amazon (joined June 2024) and Adept (January 2022-December 2024), Luan’s LinkedIn profile shows that her other key roles include:
- on the Apollo Global Management Impact Advisory Committee (January 2021-December 2022);
- Director at Google Research (September 2020-November 2021);
- VP of Engineering at OpenAI (December 2017-September 2020);
- Director of Artificial Intelligence at Axion (February 2017-November 2017);
- And CEO of Dextro (October 2011-November 2017).
According to her website, Luan has “a certificate in computer science from Worcester State since I was 12 and a BA/BS in Applied Mathematics and Political Science from Yale.”
He added that his main focus is research, but that his career “revolves around the near- and long-term impacts of artificial intelligence on society.” “I am interested in how the dynamics of AI development can shape outcomes for humans, and I try to devote as much time as possible to ethics, security and policy researchers,” he said.
David Luan joins other Adept co-founders leaving Amazon
CNBC added that his departure comes after Amazon last year announced a major reorganization of its AGI division into its AWS Cloud division.
Amazon spokespeople declined to comment, according to the report.
The Geekwire report also noted that Luan is not the first Adept co-founder to join Amazon under a so-called “acquisition agreement.” Other co-founders have also moved on to different roles in the industry:
- Erich Elsen resigned four months later and now serves as chief research scientist at Databricks.
- Augustus Odena and Maxwell Nye left about a year later and now serve as research scientists at Meta.
Before founding Adept in 2022, Luan spent three years conducting research and engineering at OpenAI and leading Google’s extensive language model efforts. 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 reps at Adept before others.
