There may be news that Adept, a startup well-known for its artificial intelligence (AI) agent ‘original’, is negotiating with Microsoft (MS). Last month, it was reported that the corporate was searching for a sale.
Fortune reported on the 18th (local time) that Adept was negotiating with Microsoft, citing well-informed sources.
Previously, in May, The Information reported that Apopt was pursuing a sale resulting from uncertainty attributable to intensifying competition with big tech and excessive costs. It was assumed that this negotiation with Microsoft was also related to the sale of the corporate, but MS announced that it had no plans to amass Adept.
In September 2022, Adept received great attention by releasing ‘Act-1’, the primary prototype of an AI agent that manipulates and executes computers as an alternative of individuals.
By studying how humans operate computers, from searching the Web to operating complex enterprise software, we’re constructing AI agents that convert text commands into actions. Last January, it launched ‘Fuyu-Heavy’, a multimodal language model (LMM) designed for AI agents.
As well as, it attracted a considerable amount of investment totaling $415 million (roughly 570 billion won) from big tech firms akin to Microsoft and NVIDIA, and joined the unicorns with a company value of not less than $1 billion inside one yr of its founding.
Adept planned to launch an AI agent this summer that automates personal computing tasks.
Nevertheless, AI agents are also being developed by big tech firms. Particularly, MS plans to introduce a form of agent function in Windows 12 by which Co-Pilot manipulates apps on behalf of the user’s requests.
It’s identified that even startups which have received a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of dollars in investment like Adept cannot guarantee their future resulting from the big cost of coaching and running AI models and intensifying competition from big tech firms akin to Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI. am.
Sources said Adept has agreed to contract terms with Microsoft, but specific details usually are not known. Even though it shouldn’t be a typical acquisition method, it is claimed that it could be much like the deal that Microsoft signed with AI startup Inflection AI in March.
It could possibly be controversial if Microsoft uses an analogous trading method to the one it used for Adept and Inflection AI.
Microsoft hired Inflection AI’s two co-founders and most of its employees, but didn’t officially acquire the corporate. As an alternative, it paid a $650 million fee to Inflection’s investors to license the rights to Inflection AI’s technology.
This led to criticism that Microsoft’s intention was to avoid having the deal blocked by antitrust regulators.
Afterwards, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began an investigation into the transaction between Microsoft and Inflection AI. Nevertheless, after a preliminary investigation, UK competition authorities decided that no motion could possibly be taken against Microsoft since the deal was not structured as a conventional acquisition.
Reporter Park Chan cpark@aitimes.com
