Amazon is reportedly working on this AI chatbot that could rival ChatGPT
Amazon is reportedly working on developing an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that could rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The company’s internal project is reportedly codenamed Metis. According to the report, the chatbot in development will be able to perform all common generative AI tasks, such as creating text content, answering questions, and more. It will also reportedly support image generation and have internet access. The report further claims that the new AI platform could launch in September 2024, around the time when Amazon hosts its annual Devices and Services event.
Amazon could soon launch its own AI chatbot
According to a Business Insider reportThe e-commerce giant is looking to directly compete with ChatGPT with its own AI model. Citing people familiar with the project, the publication claims the project is codenamed Metis, after the Greek goddess of wisdom, prudence, and deep thought. The chatbot is designed to be accessed via a web browser, similar to most popular AI chatbots.
Based on an internal document obtained by the publication, it claimed that the Metis chatbot is powered by the company’s in-house AI model, called Olympus. It is said to be more advanced than the existing Titan Large Language Model (LLM) that powers some of Amazon’s products.
In its functionality, the AI chatbot would be able to perform text-based tasks such as having conversations, answering questions, and generating content. In addition, it can also generate images, according to the report. This suggests that Metis will use a multimodal AI model. Notably, ChatGPT cannot generate images, but users can subscribe to Dall-E and use it through ChatGPT.
Metis to use generative AI framework with retrieval-augmented
The Metis chatbot will reportedly operate on the retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) AI framework. The mechanism improves the quality of responses by using a combination of text generation and information retrieval from large datasets. It is said that the chatbot will be able to access and retrieve information from the internet.
For example, it will be able to show near real-time stock price updates, something that many AI chatbots struggle with. However, both GPT-4o-powered ChatGPT and Gemini can do this.
The report claims that the project is being developed by the company’s Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) division, which is headed by Senior Vice President and Head Scientist Rohit Prasad. At the same time, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is also said to be heavily involved in the project.
The report found that some employees are concerned that Amazon is late to the AI chatbot race, which has already become quite crowded.
