After less than two years at Amazon, David Luan, the head of Amazon’s San Francisco AI lab, is departing the company. Luan announced the update in a post on LinkedIn on Tuesday, saying, “I’ll be leaving Amazon at the end of this week to cook up something new.” He added that, “There’s incredible work to be done at Amazon and opportunities for me to take on more areas. But with AGI so close, I decided to spend 100% of my time on teaching AI systems brand new capabilities.”

The loss of a top AI developer at Amazon comes as the company struggles to keep up in the AI race; even its own employees are reportedly calling its in-house AI products “Amazon Basics.” Just a few weeks ago, Amazon rolled out Alexa Plus, its revamped AI assistant, to all users in the US, although some early users have said they’d prefer to stick with the original Alexa.

Luan joined Amazon in 2024 along with other employees from his startup, Adept, which was developing AI agent technology that Amazon licensed. While at Amazon, Luan worked on its Nova AI models, including the Nova Act AI agent, which launched as a research preview in March. Act could complete web searches, make purchases, and answer questions, and Amazon said at the time of its launch that Act was already in use in Alexa Plus.