Amazon is working on an AI assistant that competes with ChatGPT, code-named ‘Metis’

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 familiar said.

At the most basic level, Metis gives text and image-based answers in a smart, conversational manner, according to the internal document. It’s also able to share links to the source of its responses, suggest follow-up queries, and generate images.

More up-to-date responses

Amazon wants Metis to use an AI technique called retrieval-augmented generation, or RAG, the people said. This means Metis will be able to retrieve information from beyond the original data used to train its underlying Olympus model.

The goal is to generate more up-to-date responses. For example, Metis should be able to share the latest stock prices, while some other chatbots that are not RAG can’t do so, the 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, like planning a vacation itinerary. Metis’s potential use cases range from turning on your lights to booking a flight for you, one of the people told BI.

There are a lot of AI assistants

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

Amazon is trying to catch up in the AI race. Its Titan model is considered less powerful than rivals, and Amazon Q, a chatbot targeting corporate customers, was met with mixed reviews. Amazon’s own AI chips, called Trainium and Inferentia, are struggling with low demand 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 its AI model training process.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment.

Andy Jassy is involved with Metis

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

But the consumer AI assistant space has been a missing spot for Amazon. An internal document last year specifically pointed out that Amazon “does not have a publicly or internally available product that looks and works exactly like ChatGPT.”

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

Amazon’s AGI team

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

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

“Playing chase”

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

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

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