Adept, the AI Co-Pilot for Your Computer

Is a software product going to be delightful but simple in functionality, or a power tool that is hard to learn? Software interfaces have always had to navigate the power vs simplicity curve, that desire to be joyful to use but also add that one more button for a niche use case. The first time we sat down with David Luan and his team at Adept, got their demo and heard about where the product was headed, it was a realization that they may have just changed the power vs simplicity paradigm of software completely.

Today we are excited to share the new investment round in Adept, with Spark Capital co-leading a $350m round with our friends at General Catalyst, and participation from existing investors including Greylock and Addition.

Adept is an AI company building a new foundational transformer model. Instead of predicting the next word like we have seen in transformer models like GPT, Adept’s Action Transformer predicts the next action a human would take in software. Depending on the task, the model is capable of complicated interactions hundreds of steps deep, across multiple applications. With Adept, you can get your work done faster and more efficiently by delegating tasks instead of navigating menus.

It’s an extremely difficult task to do this reliably, in a way that performs not just as a fun demo but with the everyday accuracy and speed we expect from our computers. Thankfully, this is one of the few all-star teams in machine learning that has the chops to pull it off.

And just as importantly, it’s a team that is not just in love with the tech, but is centered on the human relationship with computers. Technology is at its best when it is an enabler, the proverbial “bicycle for the mind” that helps us do the wonderful things we are inclined to do. With Adept on deck as our AI co-pilot for computers we’ll soon be able to create faster than ever before without sacrificing quality or accuracy; transforming mundane tasks into creative endeavors all powered by intelligent automation.

At Spark, we have always looked at the world through a product lens. We look for those seminal moments when our relationships with computers are shifting, from Oculus and Twitter, to Cruise and Descript. Adept will be a new companion for our computing, enabling our creativity and productivity in new ways, and we are incredibly excited to be along for the journey.