Lists / People

David Luan

Research-and-engineering leader (OpenAI VP Eng, Google Brain LLM lead) who crossed into building applied AI agents — co-founding Adept and running Amazon's AGI Lab.

AI research-and-engineering leader turned agent-company founder. An early VP of Engineering at OpenAI (helped ship GPT-2, scaled the team from ~30 to ~120), then led large language model efforts at Google Brain, before co-founding Adept (2022) as CEO to build agents that can "do anything a human does on a computer." In June 2024 Amazon hired Luan and senior Adept staff and licensed Adept's technology; he became VP of Autonomy and head of Amazon's AGI Lab (formalized December 2024), shipping Nova Act in March 2025, before departing in February 2026 to start something new.

#102Technical Founders

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Top 100 Technical Founders

Rank #102·Research-and-engineering leader (OpenAI VP Eng, Google Brain LLM lead) who crossed into building applied AI agents — co-founding Adept and running Amazon's AGI Lab.

Frameworks

Attributed to David Luan

Mental models, principles, and operating frameworks extracted from sources where David is the credited author or speaker.

6frameworks

Behavioral-Cloning Shortcut to AGI

You don't have to re-run evolution's compute to reach AGI — you can behaviorally clone everything humans already know.

Innovation·from Why Google failed to make GPT-3 + why Multimodal Agents are the path to AGI — with David Luan of Adept

Drive by Vision, Not APIs

Itemize the workflows where every step has an API and the count is near zero — so the agent must see and act on the screen like a human.

Innovation·from Why Google failed to make GPT-3 + why Multimodal Agents are the path to AGI — with David Luan of Adept

Multimodal for Knowledge Work, Not Cats and Dogs

Economic value is in knowledge work, so train multimodal models on charts, tables, invoices, PDFs and UIs — not COCO.

Innovation·from Why Google failed to make GPT-3 + why Multimodal Agents are the path to AGI — with David Luan of Adept

Reliability Over Generality

Demos work 60% of the time; enterprises need the nines. Prioritize reliability over everything, then climb the abstraction ladder.

Strategy·from Why Google failed to make GPT-3 + why Multimodal Agents are the path to AGI — with David Luan of Adept

Research Leader as Portfolio Allocator

A research org wins by concentrating compute on a few big bets and disbanding the rest — not by letting a bottom-up credit market allocate it.

Leadership·from Why Google failed to make GPT-3 + why Multimodal Agents are the path to AGI — with David Luan of Adept

The Augmentation Company

Always solve tasks just a little too hard for the model — keeping a human in the loop is what builds the data flywheel.

Strategy·from Why Google failed to make GPT-3 + why Multimodal Agents are the path to AGI — with David Luan of Adept

Domains

Framework distribution

6frameworks

Innovation3 frameworks · 50%

Strategy2 frameworks · 33.3%

Leadership1 framework · 0%

Appears alongside

Top neighbors of David Luan

8people

Skydio co-founder; autonomous-flight engineering posts

Tailwind CSS; "Refactoring UI"

Heroku co-founder; "12-Factor App"

Adrian Holovaty

Django co-creator; Soundslice

Anatoly Yakovenko

Solana; "8 Innovations" technical paper

Andrej Karpathy (founder side, Eureka Labs)

education-stack writing

Aravind Srinivas

Perplexity; retrieval/LLM-stack essays

HashiCorp co-founder; "Tao of HashiCorp" essays

Last updated

29 May 2026

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