Augustus Odena

QuHarrison Terry presents Augustus Odena, Co-founder of Adept, with the WTF Innovators Award for his remarkable research into AI for image synthesis and language model contributions at Google Brain which led to features like SmartFill.

The WTF Innovators Award recognizes excellence at the precipice of societal change, with the inaugural class focusing on AI innovators. As a memento, each of the 34 awardees are gifted a featured song by QuHarrison Terry and Genesis Renji. We present “Odena”, produced by Nimso, to Augustus Odena.

Adept is building a machine learning model that can interact with everything on your computer and will fundamentally change how we operate digitally. The unreleased product will be a general intelligence system or “AI Teammate” that augments and supercharges actions on any website or software tool.

In March 2023, Adept raised a $350M Series B round led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital.

Adept’s first step toward this future is their foundation model, ACT-1, a large-scale Transformer for actions that has been trained to click, type, and scroll. The multimodal model observes what is displayed on-screen, comprehends a user’s request from natural language, and then executes the task.

Augustus Odena has an impressive track record of advancing AI in the most relevant categories today. He’s been a core researcher to many important revelations for language models and GANs. And he also has a keen sense for devising AI systems that are human-centered and useful to knowledge workers, which is why he should be on everyone’s radar. – QuHarrison Terry.

Prior to co-founding Adept, Augustus Odena was a Research Scientist at Google Brain. Augustus led Google Brain's work on Program Synthesis with Large Language Models, training LLMs to write Python code from short natural language descriptions. He co-created the SmartFill Program Synthesizer which is used today across Google Sheets. And he jointly invented the Scratchpad Technique for getting Transformers to perform multi-step reasoning.

Additionally, Augustus’ research papers on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) for image synthesis have been cited over 8,000 times and pioneered techniques used across the graphics industry.