Amazon CEO Andy Jassy dropped an AI bombshell on employees today, announcing that Rohit Prasad, who has led Amazon’s so-called AGI (artificial general intelligence) team since 2023, overseeing the development of the company’s Nova models, would leave at the end of the year.
Prasad was previously the chief scientist behind Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, a role he held from the product’s earliest days. When he was named to lead AGI’s ambitious new effort following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, part of a rush to develop a competitive LLM that could help reinvigorate the Alexa voice assistant. it was run almost entirely by former Alexa executives.
In a blog postJassy announced that Peter DeSantis, longtime head of Amazon Web Services (AWS), will lead a new organization that will drive the development of its AI models, custom computer chips (which include its Graviton, Trainium, and Nitro chips), and quantum computing efforts. DeSantis had overseen the numerous teams responsible for designing AWS’s global infrastructure.
“With our Nova 2 models just launched at re:Invent, our rapidly growing custom silicon, and the benefits of model, chip, and cloud software and infrastructure optimization, we wanted to free Peter up to focus his energy, invention cycles, and leadership on these new areas,” Jassy wrote, adding that DeSantis would report directly to him.
Jassy also said that as part of the organizational change, Pieter Abbeel, an Amazon distinguished robotics scientist who is also a professor of AI and robotics at UC Berkeley, will lead the company’s frontier model research team. Abbeel came to Amazon in 2024 with other co-founders of his robotics startup Covariant, in a deal that also included licensing Covariants software to Amazon, which included AI models that gave robots the ability to quickly adapt to new environments and tasks.
“Pieter is one of the world’s leading AI researchers and co-founder of Covariant, pioneering the first commercial basis model for robotics,” Jassy wrote. “His deep expertise in generative AI and reinforcement learning makes him well-positioned to advance Amazon’s AI research as we push the boundaries of what’s possible for customers.” »
The news of Prasad’s departure is somewhat surprising, given that he was recently at Amazon’s Re:Invent conference discussing the latest Nova models. However, over the past two years, there has been significant media coverage suggesting that Amazon’s Alexa AI and AGI efforts have struggled and fallen behind competitors.
A year ago, for example, Fortune’s Jason Del Rey exclusively reported that documents leaked by Amazon identified critical flaws in Alexa’s delayed AI reboot. And in June 2024, Fortune reported that Amazon had missed Alexa’s shot at dominating AI, according to more than a dozen employees who worked on it — in part because of a lack of adequate data, even as Prasad pushed the AGI team to work harder and harder, with a message to “squeeze some magic” out of the LLM.
Additionally, Amazon’s layoffs last week fueled concerns about whether Amazon was still lagging behind in AI and whether the cuts reflected slowing growth. This follows comments in October from Bernstein analyst Mark Shmulik, who said Amazon’s AWS was in “last place” in the AI cloud race.
However, The Information as well as Bloomberg reported this week that Amazon was in talks to invest $10 billion in OpenAI. OpenAI, in turn, had agreed to use Amazon’s Tranium AI chips, perhaps helping to counter the narrative that the company is behind the times in AI. OpenAI previously agreed to spend $38 billion to use AWS for computing.
Amazon also has a deal with AI company Anthropic, in which Amazon has invested $8 billion. Anthropic has agreed to use AWS’s Trainium chips for training and Anthropic’s Claude model is used to answer some queries in the new Alexa Plus.
