Amazon opens new AI lab in San Francisco focused on long-term research bets

The Amazon AGI SF Lab will focus on developing new foundational capabilities for enabling useful AI agents.

David Luan and Pieter Abbeel.jpg
From left to right: David Luan, VP of Autonomy and head of Amazon's AGI SF Lab, and Pieter Abbeel, Amazon Scholar, Robotics.

Today, we’re excited to announce the formation of the Amazon AGI SF Lab, a new dedicated team based in San Francisco. The initial focus of our lab will be to develop new foundational capabilities for enabling useful AI agents that can take actions in the digital and physical worlds. In other words, we’re enabling practical AI that can actually do things for us and make our customers more productive, empowered, and fulfilled. Our work will build on that of Amazon’s broader AGI team, which recently introduced Amazon Nova, a new generation of state-of-the-art foundation models (FMs).

We present Amazon Nova, a new generation of state-of-the-art foundation models that deliver frontier intelligence and industry-leading price performance. Amazon Nova Pro is a highly capable multimodal model with the best combination of accuracy, speed, and cost for a wide range of tasks. Amazon Nova Lite is a low-cost multimodal model that is lightning fast for processing images, video, documents and text

The Amazon AGI SF Lab is designed to empower AI researchers and engineers to make major breakthroughs with speed and focus toward this goal. Our philosophy combines the agility of a startup with the resources of Amazon. By keeping the team lean, we’re able to maximize the amount of compute per person. Each team in the lab has the autonomy to move fast and the long-term commitment to pursue high-risk, high-payoff research.

The new lab is seeded by our team recently hired from Adept and will leverage their pioneering work in building AI agents that can handle complex workflows using the same tools we use as humans, like computers, web browsers, and code interpreters. Our initial focus is on several key research bets that will enable AI agents to perform real-world actions, learn from human feedback, self-course-correct, and infer our goals. In particular, we are really excited about the work in combining large language models (LLMs) with reinforcement learning (RL) to solve reasoning and planning, learned world models, and generalizing agents to physical environments.

Amazon Nova Canvas and Amazon Nova Reel use diffusion transformers to deliver studio-quality visual content.

We’re looking for a few dozen passionate, talented people to join our team — not just AI experts who have trained state-of-the-art models but also candidates from other disciplines who will bring fresh thinking to the field, such as physics, math, or quantitative finance, regardless of experience level. If you’re interested in our particular philosophy of AI progress, reach out via AGI-SFLab-Jobs@amazon.com.

The two of us have seen many eras of AI development. We’re entering an exciting new era where AI agents are the next playing field; the right research bets can reinvent what’s possible with AI. We’d love for you to join our new lab and build it from the ground up!

Research areas

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