Amazon is working on developing an AI chatbot that will compete directly with OpenAI's ChatGPT, according to information obtained by Business Insider.
The secretive internal project has been code-named “Metis,” presumably after the Greek goddess of wisdom, and the new service is designed to be accessed through a web browser like any other AI assistant, according to people familiar with the project and internal documents obtained by BI.
Metis is powered by Amazon's in-house AI model called Olympus, named after a Greek myth, which people said is a more powerful version of the company's publicly available Titan model.
At the most basic level, Metis provides text and image-based answers in a smart, conversational format, and can also share links to answer sources, suggest follow-up queries, and generate images, according to internal documents.
More up-to-date answer
Amazon wants Metis to use an AI technique called search augmentation generative (RAG), which would allow Metis to derive information from outside the original data used to train the underlying Olympus model, according to the people.
The goal is to generate more up-to-date responses — for example, Metis should be able to share the latest stock prices, whereas non-RAG chatbots can't, said a person familiar with the matter.
Metis is also expected to function as an AI agent, which can automate and perform complex tasks based on existing data, such as planning a vacation itinerary, according to one of the people. Potential use cases for Metis range from turning on lights to booking flights, one of the people told BI.
There are many AI assistants
With Metis, Amazon is entering an already crowded AI assistant market: Arch rivals Microsoft and Google both released their own AI assistants about two years ago, and OpenAI has been pouring billions of dollars into its market leader ChatGPT for years. Anthropic and other AI startups also offer AI chatbots and assistants.
Amazon is playing catch-up in the AI race. Its Titan model was deemed inferior to rivals, and Amazon Q, a chatbot targeted at business customers, received mixed reviews. As BI previously reported, Amazon's own AI chips, called Trainium and Inferentia, have suffered from low demand and performance issues. Last month, Amazon even directed some employees to help scrape open-source data on GitHub to speed up the process of training AI models.
An Amazon spokesman declined to comment.
Andy Jassy is involved with Metis
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has previously said that nearly every division of the company is 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 are currently on pace to generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue and that he expects it to generate “tens of billions of dollars” in sales over the next few years.
But the consumer AI assistant space has been an area where Amazon has been lacking: an internal company document last year specifically noted that Amazon has “no publicly or internally available product with the exact same look and functionality as ChatGPT.”
Jassy has been directly involved with Metis and recently reviewed the team's progress, one of the people said, adding that the project is currently being tested internally.
Amazon's AGI team
Metis is part of Amazon's AGI team, led by chief scientist and senior vice president Rohit Prasad, according to people familiar with the project. Jassy said last year that the team would report to him and be responsible for building Amazon's most ambitious AI models, BI previously reported. AGI vice president Vishal Sharma has direct oversight of Project Metis, one of the people said.
Amazon is also using Alexa to develop Metis, two of the people said. Many of the employees working on Metis are coming from Alexa's AI team, and the technology is using some of the resources of an upgraded version of Alexa that the company is calling “Remarkable Alexa” internally. BI first reported in January that Amazon was planning to launch a new paid version of Alexa with Remarkable Alexa, as well as a new web browser-based service.
“catch and run”
The tentative release date for Metis is in September, right around the time Amazon holds its big Alexa event, though the schedule could change, one of the people said. Still, some on the Metis team said they feel like Amazon is already late to the game on AI chatbots, and it's unclear how much the company is committed to investing in the project.
“The technology could work, but the question is whether it's too late,” one of the people said. “We're playing cat and mouse.”
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