Amazon is secretly working on a ChatGPT killer

Metis is powered by an internal Amazon AI model called Olympus, another name inspired by Greek mythology. This is a more powerful version of the company’s publicly available Titan model, the people said.

At the most basic level, Metis provides text and image-based responses in an intelligent, conversational way, according to the internal document. It is also able to share links to the source of its answers, suggest follow-up questions and generate images.

More updated answers

Amazon wants Metis to use an artificial intelligence technique called feedback-augmented generation, the people said. This means that Metis will be able to receive information from beyond the original data used to train its underlying Olympus model.

The goal is to generate more up-to-date answers. For example, Metis should be able to share the latest stock prices, while some other non-RAG chatbots cannot, people familiar with the situation said.

Metis is also expected to work as an AI agent, one of the people said. AI agents are capable of automating and performing complex tasks based on existing data, such as making a vacation itinerary. Use cases for Metis could include turning on lights and booking a flight for you, one of the people told BI.

There are many AI assistants

With Metis, Amazon is joining an already crowded AI assistant market. Its biggest rivals, Microsoft and Google, launched their own AI assistants nearly two years ago, while OpenAI has poured billions of dollars into its market-leading ChatGPT for years. Anthropic and several other AI startups also offer chatbots and AI assistants.

Amazon is trying to catch up in the AI ​​race. Its Titan model is considered less powerful than its rivals, and Amazon Q, a chatbot aimed at corporate customers, was met with mixed reviews. Amazon’s own AI chips, called Trainium and Inferentia, are struggling with low requirements and performance issues, as BI previously reported. Last month, Amazon even instructed some employees to help scrape GitHub’s open source data to speed up the AI ​​model training process.

An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.

Andy Jassy is involved with Metis

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy previously said that almost every part of the company was working on some kind of AI project. The company is a pioneer in cloud computing and has been working on machine learning, a type of AI, for years. Jassy recently said that Amazon’s AI initiatives were on pace to generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue, and that he expected them to bring in “tens of billions of dollars” in sales over the next several years.

But AI customer assistants have been a sore spot for Amazon. An internal document last year specifically noted that Amazon “does not have a publicly or internally available product that looks and works exactly like ChatGPT.”

Jassy is directly involved with Metis and recently reviewed the team’s progress, one of the people said. The project is being tested internally, this person added.

Amazon’s AGI Team

Metis is part of Amazon’s AGI team, led by Rohit Prasad, its chief scientist and a senior vice president, people familiar with the project said. Jassy last year said this team would report to him and be responsible for building Amazon’s most ambitious AI models, BI previously reported. Vishal Sharma, vice president of general artificial intelligence, has direct oversight of Project Metis, one of the people said.

Amazon is also relying on Alexa for Metis development, two of the people said. Many employees working at Metis were moved over from Alexa’s AI team, and Metis’ technology uses some of the resources found in the improved version of Alexa, called internally “Alexa Extraordinary,” they said. BI first reported in January that Amazon planned to release a new, paid version of Alexa, powered by Remarkable Alexa, and a new browser-based web service.

‘Playing Chase’

The tentative launch date for Metis is September, right around the time Amazon hosts a big Alexa event, though the timeline could change, one of the people said. However, several people on the Metis team said it felt like Amazon was already late to the AI-chatbot game, and it’s unclear how much investment the company has committed to the project.

“Technically it will work, I guess, but the question is whether it’s already too late,” one of the people said. “We’re playing catch.”

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