Amazon’s head of AI confirmed on Monday that founder and executive chair Jeff Bezos is “very involved” in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence efforts even though he’s no longer CEO, while also brushing off concerns that AI foundation models have “hit a wall” in terms of how much improvement new releases are demonstrating over past versions.
“Every time we come close to a wall, there’s a new dimension,” Amazon SVP Rohit Prasad said Monday at Fortune's Brainstorm AI event in San Francisco.
Prasad, who oversees the tech giant’s Artificial General Intelligence division, was responding to a question about the current debate in AI circles over whether new versions of large language models are not improving as much as they once did. Prasad argued that AI developers have repeatedly found ways to overcome technical barriers.
“I think we’ll keep finding that … sometimes every decade, sometimes every five years, every three years, you continue to shift the curve up on performance,” he said.
Amazon released a collection of new LLM models last week dubbed Nova, giving the company a major in-house AI model to compete with the likes of OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta, as well as Anthropic, a startup in which Amazon has invested $8 billion.
Prasad’s team is also heavily involved in the development of a new version of Alexa that will allow users to converse with the voice assistant in a more conversational tone, and request that Alexa take actions on their behalf. The new Alexa was first announced in September of 2023 but still hasn’t been released owing to multiple delays stemming from issues ranging from organizational structural challenges to concerns over “latency,” or how long it takes the assistant to respond to some requests, as Fortune exclusively reported.
Prasad didn’t provide much of an update on Alexa, other than noting, “stay tuned,” but he reaffirmed that the goal continues to be creating the world’s best personal assistant. Prasad did add, as Fortune previously reported, that one goal is for users to be able to take actions, such as ordering an Uber or making a restaurant reservation, simply by asking Alexa to do so.
Asked about Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s involvement in the company, Prasad noted that “he’s very involved, as he said”: Last week, Bezos had said in a public interview that 95% of the time he still spends at Amazon pertains to AI.
“He’s still very much connected with AI, where I spend a lot of time, and so I get to see him,” Prasad said, adding that he felt “very fortunate for that partnership and mentorship.”
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