Amazon Appears Behind in Gen AI

• Can Amazon remain relevant in Generative AI as it struggles to keep up with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and even Apple?

Hey Everyone,

?? From our sponsor: ??

Turn your unread newsletters into a personal podcast. Jellypod AI creates a personal podcast every morning of all of your favorite newsletters.

Download on iOS

Amazon’s work in LLMs and with upgrading Alexa have really been underwhelming in recent months and years.

Sure they have Amazon Bedrock, have a bunch of vendors on AWS, but what they have released themselves has been underwhelming. There have also been a lot of layoffs and some executive confusion around their own vision of building LLM products.

To get some credibility back in my opinion, Amazon needs to at least:

• Release an upgraded version of Alexa, and charge a subscription that can generate revenue.
• Launch Metis, based on Amazon’s internal Olympus LLM.
• Keep working with Anthropic and leverage it in its robotics department to compete directly with Tesla, Figure and Chinese robot makers.
• Keep improving Amazon Bedrock and B2B Generative AI vendors and their scope in Agentic AI.
• Turn Metis into a Search LLM bot that uses RAG in a similar way as Perplexity.

However in recent times, they outbid Microsoft for Adept AI. They are also leaning into automating their Finance. I had high hopes for Adept AI and startups like Imbue, these were supposed to be some of the startups who were first movers working on Agentic AI.

On June 28th, 2024 we find out that Adept AI, a startup developing AI-powered “agents” to complete various software-based tasks, has agreed to license its tech to Amazon and the startup’s co-founders and portions of its team have joined the ecommerce giant. This sounds similar to what occurred with Inflection AI and Microsoft, who poached (acquired, whatever you want to call it) the majority of their talent.

Geekwire’s Taylor Soper first reported the news. Back in 2023 Amazon has been rumored to be working on its own LLM, code named “Olympus,” the rumored LLM was set to be one of the largest foundation models ever trained at an alleged 2 trillion parameters. Now they are supposedly working on Metis, and of course still working on Alexa’s overhaul with Generative AI, that is officially getting a bit late.

If we zoom out for all Microsoft and Google have done or accomplished in Generative AI, Apple and Amazon have accomplished very little and have been even slower than the likes of Alibaba and Baidu. Alibaba’s open-source models are now some of the best globally while Baidu apparently has over 300 million users, if we are to believe their numbers. Baidu have released Ernie 4.0 Turbo. While Amazon has invested up to $4 Billion in Anthropic, it seems not all of them will be significant players themselves.

AWS Is Growing Slower than Azure and Google Cloud

This might cause AWS to lose marketshare to Microsoft Azure and maybe even be overtaken by 2030 the way things are going. However Amazon is making incredible progress in its digital advertising business compared with the likes of Microsoft or Apple. In their weird licensing deals the likes of Inflection AI and Adept AI still pretend they aren’t closing down shop.Zach Brock, head of engineering, is taking over as CEO as Adept refocuses its efforts on “solutions that enable agentic AI.” It’s not clear what Adept AI originally contributed to the space since they were founded.

The deal provides a lifeline for Adept, which has reportedly been in talks with Meta and Microsoft over the past few months about a potential acquisition. Microsoft previously invested in the startup. It’s been really awkward to see what’s happend to pioneers like Stability AI, Adept AI and Imbue. These were some of the most promising startups in Generative AI when things first started to kick off around two years ago.

• If you want to read my deep dives, consider upgrading on my flagship Newsletter, AI Supremacy:

Subscribe now

Amazon is supposedly building a secret agent or LLM called Metis. Apparently it will be able to do things like book flights, plan vacations and control lights in your home. Amazon has been trying to keep pace with competitors in AI by developing services and through its investment in OpenAI competitor Anthropic but has been lack-lustre in its own engineering and innovation around the space. This has somewhat surprised me. You’d think Amazon takes R&D and AI seriously.

David Luan, Adept's co-founder and CEO, is jumping ship to lead Amazon's "AGI Autonomy" team.

Geekwire reports that Luan will work under Rohit Prasad, the former Alexa head who’s leading a new AGI team focused on building large language models.AGI team? Maybe Amazon is just being more secretive about its plans? Adept AI has raised over $410 million and is valued above $1 billion. It’s curious that Amazon apparently outbid Meta and Microsoft for the licensing-acquihire. The Amazon spokesperson said the Adept employees have already joined the company and about 20 Adept workers remain at the startup.

Metis and Olympus Amazon’s Generative AI

Metis appears to also use RAG and according to Business Insider, based on an internal document obtained by the publication, it claimed that the Metis chatbot will be 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 is said to be able to perform text-based tasks such as having conversations, answering queries, and generating content. Additionally, it can also generate images, as per the report. This suggests that Metis will use a multimodal AI model.

Amazon hopes to launch the upgraded version of Alexa later this year with a subscription. Amazon’s subscription for Alexa will not be included in the $139-per-year Prime offering. While Microsoft has gotten so good with SaaS model subscriptions, Amazon really just has Prime.

Metis will be able to pull information from beyond the original data used to train its underlying Olympus model. Metis is also expected to work as a personal assistant that can automate and perform more complicated tasks. Given what frontier models can do already, it’s unclear if Amazon will be able to compete with the likes of those models.

But will Adept AI’s IP and talent make a difference?

“David and his team’s expertise in training state-of-the-art multimodal foundational models and building real-world digital agents aligns with our vision to delight consumer and enterprise customers with practical AI solutions,” Prasad wrote in a memo to employees obtained by Geekwire. “[The license] will accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows.”

Amazon has failed to utilize Generative AI to grow AWS sales in a meaningful way in the last couple of years, and it has to be viewed as a huge failure given what Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are doing. Notably, Sales growth in AWS’ has decelerated in recent quarters as companies trimmed their cloud spend.

Adept managed to win over backers including Nvidia, Atlassian, Workday and Greylock with its technology, raising over $415 million in capital and reaching a valuation of around $1 billion. But the startup’s been plagued with disfunction. Adept lost two of its co-founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar (who themselves founded Essential AI), early on, and it’s struggled to bring any product to market despite months and months of testing. Nvidia makes some smart bets but this wasn’t one of them.

Amazon’s Hopes Metis Can be Impactful

Metis, according to Business Insider, is being developed by the company's Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) division which is led by the Senior Vice President and Head Scientist Rohit Prasad. At the same time, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is also said to be very involved with the project.

The report highlights that some employees are concerned that Amazon might be too late into the AI chatbot race, which is already getting a bit too crowded. So it’s not just me who feels this way? That’s comforting. Amazon might struggle to retain top AI talent given this atmosphere of confusion and being behind in Generative AI at the company. This wouldn’t have occured in the Bezos days of the company.

The market for AI agents is a tad more crowded than it was at Adept’s launch. There are so many great coding Generative AI startups now as well.

Rohit Prasad, a senior vice president and head scientist who oversees Amazon’s artificial general intelligence unit, wrote in a memo to employees on Friday that the company hired Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan and “a few other deeply talented team members to our AGI team.”

But why does Amazon have an “AGI” unit? And why are they so behind? That’s a deeper question outside the scope of this article. Amazon has also pumped billions of dollars into OpenAI competitor Anthropic but needs to overhaul Alexa at least as fast as OpenAI is coming to Siri.

Amazon’s deal with Adept mirrors Microsoft’s recent hiring of Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder and former CEO of consumer chatbot startup Inflection AI, along with Inflection co-founder Karén Simonyan and other employees. Microsoft started a new unit with that move called Microsoft AI, including trying to relocate some of Microsoft Asia Research to North America and outside of Hong Kong and China. Microsoft Azure has been positively impacted by their partnership with OpenAI, getting early access to GPT-4 and building this Copilot Era. For Apple and Amazon, things have been embarrassingly slow.

Underwhelming 2022 and 2023 followed by a weak showing in 2024 for Amazon in AI

Amazon’s Gen AI announcements have been weak. Amazon Q is a chatbot developed by Amazon for enterprise use. Based on both Amazon Titan and GPT generative artificial intelligence, it was announced on November 28, 2023. I barely hear it mentioned anywhere. Then there is Amazon Rufus (March, 2024), another chatbot that has gotten poor reviews. It’s been really peculiar to see how out of touch Amazon has been on the Generative AI front. It also shows you how little top tier research talent they have compared to Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and others.

But what exactly will be the point of Metis? Is it more Perplexity or more Microsoft Copilot? Metis can generate conversational text- and image-based answers, provide source links, suggest follow-up questions, and generate images, according to the internal document. Like other chatbots, this AI will be able to share links, respond to follow-up queries and generate its own images. But does the world need another chatbot?

Metis is reportedly also meant to be an AI agent, able to complete tasks such as turning on lights and booking flights, a person told Business Insider. An Agent that might live inside of Alexa? The details are scarce. So is the launch date. But an upgraded Alexa and Metis hopefully are two different things. While Amazon is not new to the AI race, it is behind when it comes to competing with AI assistants from its rivals, including Microsoft and Google. Google and Microsoft have a great variety of AI products announced or live already, while even Meta (formerly Facebook) have made a variety of LLMs and contributions to the open-source LLM space along with a Character.AI like product they are launching soon for Instagram.

Even Amazon’s investments in LLM startups have been lackluster as compared to the likes of Nvidia and Microsoft in recent months and years. If Amazon is cost cutting, making layoffs, where is the money going if not in Generative AI? Alibaba has made a huge push in AI in 2023 and 2024. But at Amazon I don’t sense the same urgency and it’s truly perplexity. While I don’t believe Microsoft’s Copilot era will have legs, at least they did a massive push. Apple Intelligence is weak, but at least it’s product centric on their hardware advantage and distribution. But where is Amazon’s unified strategy in AI? IF I was Bezos, I’d be pissed.

Will Anyone Pay for a Smart Alexa?

Amazon’s strategy in AI has been so weak by the time an upgraded Alexa comes out, many consumers are liable not to care. This new “Remarkable Alexa” could cost $5 to $10 a month and would let users ask Alexa for more advanced features like composing emails or ordering from Uber Eats with a single prompt. By then there will be many failed devices able to do that too.

Amazon, what have you done for me lately? I’m starting to get nervous for you. From Metis, to Olympus, to Titan, to Rufus, it’s really hit and miss and well mostly miss. Alexa needs to be totally rebranded in its new capabilities and Alexa needs to now compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4o in terms of level.

We might be witnessing the decline of AWS in terms of their subpart Generative AI capabilities. At least their vendors seem good. The AWS unit includes teams overseeing the cashierless tech, called Just Walk Out, as well as its Dash smart carts and Amazon One palm-based payment technology. I hope the “AGI” unit can do better. Time will tell.?