In this News Desk Interview, Aaron Back, VP/Principal Analyst, Acceleration Economy, speaks with David Luan, CEO of Adept AI, at Oracle CloudWorld. The two discuss the work at Adept AI, a company recently founded by Luan that is dedicated to building general intelligence.
Highlights
00:07 — Luan is currently the CEO of a new company called Adept AI, which he says has been around for 10 months. Prior to his role at Adept, he was at Google as the leader of its large models effort. Before that, he was the director of research engineering at OpenAI from 2017-2020.
01:23 — Luan describes the difference between general intelligence and artificial general intelligence, also known as AGI.
01:36 — At Adept AI, the team is building a natural language interface. The goal is to enable users to do anything they could do on their machine by asking their computer to do it in their language. Users will be able to type or speak what they want the computer to do, whether it be short or long-term. Laun says that, to him, general intelligence means that you can do anything that you can put into words.
02:27 — The Adept AI team is working to take the tech aspect out and equip business users with a simple interface to accomplish tasks of any size. Essentially, general intelligence is the end-user interface that every knowledge worker can use. The organization has trained the underlying technology to be a text-to-action model, making it directly useful for an end user.
04:06 — The target audience of Adept AI is really everyone, reports Luan. Their general intelligence has already been trained to use a web browser and can do things based on language alone.
05:13 — What can Oracle do for Adept AI to continue to deliver on human-plus-AI for partnerships? Aside from “the simple stuff” that is still very important, Luan says Adept AI has had success with building models on top of OCI. Oracle and Adept AI have a similar philosophy of making as many productivity gains as possible that are accessible to all users.
06:38 — Many people across all knowledge areas and industries are excited about this work, according to Luan. The company is starting with use cases that a typical person would end up seeing “work all the time.” Over time, Adept AI plans to expand its models across more specified industries by training its general intelligence to perform a variety of capabilities.
08:52 — What are action transformers? Luan unpacks details about Adept AI’s action transformers, ACT-1, which is a base model that powers the Adept product. ACT-1 is the first model to understand what users are doing on a computer. It was trained by being fed all the background knowledge of everything that is present on the internet and being shown numerous examples of people doing things on a computer so that the transformer can understand how to use various tools.
10:55 — How is Adept AI helping with the AI governance that is necessary in today’s world? In response to this critical question, Luan shares that at Adept AI, the organization’s goal is to build tools that make humans able to do anything they can think about in language. Humans are always at the center of their work. The goal is not to replace humans but to enable them to perform better.
13:09 — Luan elaborates on what’s next for Adept AI, both in and outside of its recent partnership with Oracle. People have had a tremendous interest in having a natural language interface within Oracle products made possible through the partnership with Adept AI, says Luan. For the company specifically, the goal is to “be the interface to your computer.” As general intelligence continues to expand, it will eventually displace a GUI (graphical user interface).
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