Founder Intelligence
David Luan
The next leap in artificial intelligence is models that take action—software agents that execute multi-step workflows on computers like human experts.
- Role
- Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder
- Company
- Adept
- Country
- United States
Ecosystem Connection Map
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Overview
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David Luan is an artificial intelligence engineering executive and entrepreneur who serves as Chief Executive Officer of Adept. Luan previously served as Vice President of Engineering at OpenAI and Research Director at Google Brain, pioneering the transition from conversational text generation to autonomous action-taking models.
Why it matters
Luan expanded the frontier of machine learning from language comprehension to digital action, establishing the foundational architecture for modern autonomous software agents.
Editorial insight
David Luan is a publicly documented leader at Adept.
Career & Timeline
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Education & Dextro Acquisition
Luan studied applied mathematics and computer science at Harvard University. In 2013, he founded Dextro, building one of the earliest convolutional neural network platforms for video recognition, which was acquired by law enforcement technology leader Axon in 2017.
OpenAI VP of Engineering & Google Brain
Luan joined OpenAI as VP of Engineering in 2018, managing technical teams that built and scaled GPT-2 and GPT-3. He subsequently moved to Google Brain to direct foundation model research and transformer scaling systems alongside Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar.
Founding Adept & Action Transformers (ACT-1)
In 2022, Luan co-founded Adept in San Francisco to create **ACT-1**, a foundation model that operates software interfaces, web browsers, and desktop tools using direct keyboard and mouse actions.
Companies
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Products
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Adept — Enterprise AI platform
Explore Adept — Enterprise AI platform by Adept. Verified AI product intelligence covering core capabilities, Enterprise Software use…
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FAQ
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Who is David Luan?
David Luan is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur serving as Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Adept, the AI company that pioneered Action Transformers.
What leadership roles did David Luan hold at OpenAI and Google Brain?
Luan served as Vice President of Engineering at OpenAI (leading the engineering teams behind GPT-2 and GPT-3) and later co-led large-scale foundation model research at Google Brain.
What did David Luan build before OpenAI?
Luan studied applied math and computer science at Harvard University and founded Dextro, an early deep learning computer vision company for real-time video analysis, acquired by Axon in 2017.
Sources & Verification
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