Amazon is secretly developing an AI chatbot to go head-to-head against OpenAI’s ChatGPT, according to a report from Business Insider.
Citing sources with knowledge of the project and an internal document it obtained, the publication said Amazon is working on the chatbot under the codename “Metis.” The name is likely a reference to the Greek goddess of wisdom.
Metis is powered by an improved version of Amazon’s publicly available Titan AI model, known internally as Olympus. The service is reportedly designed to do everything ChatGPT can, and more.
Like other chatbots, Metis can be accessed through a browser and is designed to provide users with text- and image-based answers in an intelligent, conversational manner. However, Amazon’s chatbot will reportedly feature retrieval-augmented generation to set it apart from competitors (at least those that don’t have it).
Retrieval-augmented generation functionality will allow Metis to access and retrieve information other than the data used to train the AI model underpinning it. Unlike chatbots like ChatGPT, which can only pull from data they have already been trained on, Amazon’s chatbot will be able to generate more up-to-date responses and have real-time capabilities like checking current stock prices or the weather.
Amazon has already been dipping its toes in the AI and Machine Learning space with specialized chips from AWS, investments in startups like Anthropic, and AI-powered features like automatic listing generation and review highlights for its marketplace. However, the company has sorely lacked a publicly available chatbot product so far.
Last year, Amazon itself noted in an internal document that the company “does not have a publicly or internally available product that looks and works exactly like ChatGPT.” Metis seeks to remedy that, however.
Amazon will enter the AI chatbot space, which already has a forerunner in ChatGPT, as a complete newcomer. It will also have to contend with chatbot offerings from rival tech giants like Microsoft and Google, which have had horses in the AI chatbot race for a couple of years now. Not to mention, there are several startups like Anthropic that have already carved out pieces of the market for themselves with their own AI chatbots and startups.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is directly involved in the development of Metis and recently reviewed the project’s progress, per one source. The chatbot is already being tested internally, the source added.
Jassy is putting a lot of stock in Amazon’s AI efforts, recently noting that the company’s AI projects will generate “tens of billions of dollars” in revenue over the next several years. While there’s been no AI assistant offering from Amazon so far, virtually every team at the company has been working on some kind of AI project.
Metis is being developed by Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence (AGI team), reports directly to Jassy and is responsible for the company’s most ambitious AI endeavours. The team is spearheaded by its head scientist, senior vice president Rohit Prasad.
Amazon’s work on Metis is borrowing both development data and resources from Alexa’s AI team, said sources. According to recent reports, Amazon has been working on an advanced, paid version of Alexa, dubbed “Remarkable Alexa,” with state-of-the-art generative AI capabilities.
One of the sources said Amazon plans to launch Metis in September, which is right around the time the company usually hosts an annual Alexa-focused event. The service is still a work-in-progress, so this timeline is subject to change.
“Technically it will work, I guess, but the question is if it’s already too late,” one of the sources told Business Insider. “We’re playing chase.”
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