Amazon hoping ChatGPT killer will be ready later this year

LLM 'Metis' will boast twice the parameters of GPT-4

Amazon hopes to counter the perception that it's fallen behind in the race to develop GenAI

Amazon is, according to a report in Business Insider, developing an AI powered chatbot with the aim of competing with ChatGPT.

The chatbot, code-named Metis, is powered by an Amazon LLM model named Olympus, which is, according to various leaks and reports, being trained on 2 trillion parameters of data which is approximately double the parameters of GPT-4.

The increased capacity should work to make Metis more capable of generating human like responses and less likely to hallucinate or make contextual errors.

Metis adds Amazon to a growing list of tech giants and startups offering new AI assistants, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon-backed Anthropic, among several others.

Amazon has been pushing hard in the generative AI space, trying to counter the perception that it was caught flat footed in the race to monetise generative AI.

The recent AWS Summit in London was dominated by generative AI and CEO Andy Jassy, is reportedly directly involved with Metis. Jassy has previously set out a triple later AI strategy involving enabling customers to create new AI foundation models, helping them use existing foundation models, and building AI driven applications.

Computing reported yesterday on Amazon's efforts to make its Alexa service turn a profit, and it is in the application layer via the Alexa service and brand where Jassy envisions payback.

Last year Amazon rolled out "Amazon Q," a generative AI-powered assistant for enterprise use, and in February released Rufus, a new AI shopping assistant.

Reports suggest a tentative launch date of September for Metis.

Computing says:

We shouldn't read too much into names but it is fun. Metis is an interesting, and perhaps revealing name choice. It's another gendered AI project – Metis being a mythological Greek goddess, and first wife and advisor of Zeus. She was eventually consumed by Zeus having been tricked into changing her form, because he was scared of what his and Metis's offspring would become.

It will be interesting to see how likely Metis is to be consumed by another tech company which fears it and whatever it spawns.