The Tool Desk
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Who is David Luan?
Luan is an AI executive and researcher who joined Amazon in June 2024 as part of an acqui-hire arrangement involving leaders from Adept AI Labs. CRN identifies him as Adept’s former CEO and a former engineering director at OpenAI. Before Adept, he spent about three years leading research and engineering at OpenAI and led Google’s large-language-model effort.
Reflecting on that work, Luan said, “At OpenAI, I was lucky to incubate the first GPTs.” At Amazon, he led the AGI Lab and agentic-AI research and development, including the effort behind Nova Act.
Why did the head of Amazon’s AGI Lab leave?
Luan said he was leaving to “cook up something new,” but did not publicly give a more specific reason in the announcement reported by GeekWire on Feb. 24, 2026. He also wrote that Nova Act’s team “will be in great hands” with Peter DeSantis. The available statements establish his plan to pursue a new project, not a dispute or a disclosed change in Amazon’s strategy.
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What is Nova Act?
Nova Act is an AI model and developer toolkit for building agents that can carry out tasks autonomously in web browsers. Amazon unveiled it in March 2025, and it later became generally available as an AWS service. That makes it a tool developers can use to build browser-operating agents, rather than simply a consumer chatbot.
GeekWire reported that Luan named Hertz, 1Password, and Amazon.com as Nova Act customers. He also said the model reached the top of REALBench’s agent research leaderboard. That is a reported result on that leaderboard, not a standardized comparison establishing that Nova Act outperforms every other agent system.
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- Alexa is happy to help – Ask Alexa for weather updates and to set hands-free timers, get answers to your questions and even hear jokes. Need a few extra minutes in the morning? Just tap your Echo Dot to snooze your alarm.
- Keep your home comfortable – Control compatible smart home devices with your voice and routines triggered by built-in motion or indoor temperature sensors. Create routines to automatically turn on lights when you walk into a room, or start a fan if the inside temperature goes above your comfort zone.
- Do more with device pairing – Fill your home with music using compatible Echo devices in different rooms, or create a home theatre system with Fire TV.
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What happens to Amazon’s AI team now?
Amazon’s employee announcement assigns leadership across the organization and research teams as follows:
| Leader | Role or transition |
|---|---|
| Peter DeSantis | Leads the organization covering Amazon’s Nova and AGI models, custom silicon, and quantum computing. |
| Pieter Abbeel | Leads the frontier-model research team. |
| Rohit Prasad | Plans to leave Amazon at the end of 2026, after two years leading Nova and AGI. |
Amazon said that twelve state-of-the-art foundation models were built under Prasad’s two-year Nova and AGI leadership. Luan’s departure therefore sits within a broader handoff: DeSantis is taking responsibility for the wider organization, Abbeel for frontier research, and Prasad has a later announced departure date.
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