Text: Juny Editor: VickyXiao

Image Source: Generated by Wujie AI

In the past year and a half, various chatbots have undoubtedly taken the center stage in the wave of generative AI.

Engaging in conversations with chatbots to have AI generate text, images, and videos seems to be the most popular way for more people to come into contact with and experience generative AI technology.

However, a generative AI company named Adept AI did not follow the trend of focusing on this track. They believe that language models can not only generate textual content, but can also advance to creating and executing "actions," becoming a new generation of operating systems, revolutionizing the interaction between people and computers.

The founding team of Adept AI can be described as "explosive." Its co-founders include Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, two renowned scholars who proposed the Google Transformer architecture and were authors of the paper "Attention Is All You Need," as well as a low-profile Chinese tech giant, David Luan.

Since its establishment in January last year, Adept AI has received investments from big names and well-known VCs, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Tesla's head of autonomous driving, Andrej Karpathy. In March of this year, Adept AI, which had just been established for over a year, announced a $350 million investment from companies including Microsoft and Nvidia, with a valuation exceeding $1 billion, making it one of the hottest generative AI unicorns at present.

Founders' Stories

As mentioned at the beginning, Adept AI has an extremely impressive founding team. Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar had previously worked in Google's AI research department for many years. Their joining almost made Adept AI a "royal flush" from the start as two of the main proponents of the Transformer.

Image Source: arXiv

However, about a year after joining Adept AI, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar shifted their main focus to another rather mysterious new startup project called Stealth Startup. But this did not stop Adept AI's progress. After Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar left at the end of last year, the management burden of Adept AI fell on another Chinese co-founder, David Luan.

Many people may not have heard of David Luan before, but he is a genuine tech giant with a legendary personal background.

David Luan moved from China to the United States with his family at the age of 6 and showed signs of being a "child prodigy" from a young age. He began studying college courses at the age of 8 and became a member of the first Thiel Fellowship at the age of 19. The Thiel Fellowship is a scholarship established by Silicon Valley billionaire and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, specifically selecting young entrepreneurial talents under the age of 20.

At that time, David Luan's area of interest was robotics. He attempted to independently develop control systems for intelligent robots starting from high school. During his time at Yale, he took a two-year leave of absence to establish a project for a robot application store. Later, he focused on researching deep learning technology, founded the AI company Dextro, mainly involved in automatic classification and segmentation of videos and scenes, and was later acquired by the law enforcement security company Axon.

Later, David Luan continued to delve into deep learning technology. He joined OpenAI in 2017 and was deeply involved in the development of GPT-2 and GPT-3. In 2019, he joined Google's research department as a technical director. After that, he joined Apollo's Impact Advisory Committee as an advisor. At the end of 2021, he co-founded Adept AI with former Google colleagues Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar.

Image Source: LinkedIn

Main Business

Adept AI's current main goal is to create a general operating tool based on generative AI technology, allowing users to issue commands through voice or text, which will be understood by artificial intelligence to help complete various operations and tasks.

In simple terms, Adept AI's goal is to establish a completely new operating system or platform based on generative AI, fundamentally changing the process of people using applications or web pages to perform software operations. Currently, the product is mainly implemented by Adept AI's self-developed large model, Action Transformer (ACT-1).

So how exactly can ACT-1 be used in our daily lives?

In the examples provided by Adept AI, ACT-1 exists in the form of a desktop dialog box. You can call it up on your computer at any time, and the user only needs to enter commands in the text box, and ACT-1 will automatically complete all operations step by step.

For example, if you want it to help you find a house in Houston suitable for 4 people and priced at less than $600,000, Adept can quickly understand and capture the key information and then begin executing the operation. The difference from Microsoft's Copilot is that Copilot mainly provides information for you, while Adept can directly perform actions on the page, including jumping, clicking, and entering numbers.

For some professional software, the previous operation process may be very complex and require users to have professional operational knowledge to complete correctly. But now, you only need to issue natural language commands, and Adept can automatically execute the entire process. For example, what previously required at least 10 clicks in Salesforce can now be completed with just one sentence.

In addition to single software, the ACT-1 model can also perform operations across software, automatically combining multiple tools according to the task. For example, if you want to search for an item on a second-hand platform, after automatically filtering out the desired items, it can automatically open your email and write and send the email for you.

In addition, Adept also has a high level of adaptability and self-correction ability. It can find the best solution and make operational corrections based on the user's input commands and feedback.

Since the operations of Adapt AI are driven by AI modules rather than applications, different functions can be independently developed and updated, greatly enhancing flexibility and scalability.

Adept AI believes that in the future, most user interactions with computers will be completed using natural language rather than graphical user interfaces (GUI). We only need to describe to the computer what we want to do, and it can automatically complete it. In the era of artificial intelligence, today's user interfaces will soon become as outdated as landline phones.

Adept's product has not been officially released yet, but user experience applications have been opened. Interested individuals can apply to join the trial list on its official website. In addition, according to public data, Adept currently has only about 25 employees and is recruiting more technical personnel in Silicon Valley.

Funding Experience

Since its official establishment in January 2022, Adept AI has only completed two rounds of financing, with a large number of well-known investors participating in each round.

In April 2022, Adept AI received a Series A financing of $65 million. Investment institutions included venture capital fund Saam Motamedi, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Tesla Autopilot head Andrej Karpathy, Skype early developer Jaan Tallinn, and Stanford University computer scientist and Lattice Data co-founder Chris Ré, among others.

In March 2023, Adept AI announced that it had raised $350 million in Series B financing. This round of financing was led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital, with other participants including Greylock, Atlassian Ventures, Microsoft, Nvidia, Workday Ventures, Caterina Fake, Frontiers Capital, PSP Growth, SV Angel, and others. According to Forbes, after this round of financing, Adept AI's valuation is at least $1 billion.

Image Source: Crunchbase

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