Amazon has a new leader for its AGI group as it plays catch-up with artificial intelligence

Amazon’s head of general artificial intelligence, Rohit Prasad, will leave the company next year as it reaches an “inflection point” in the development of the technology. CEO Andy Jassy made the announcement on Wednesday. As part of the change, Peter DeSantis, senior vice president at Amazon Web Services, will head a new division focused on the company’s most advanced AI models, chip development, and quantum computing.

Prasad joined Amazon in 2013 and played a key role in developing the company’s Alexa voice assistant. He also oversaw the launch of Amazon Nova AI models and later became the head of the AGI team in 2023. While other AI giants are touting their performance in various AI benchmarks, Prasad It was recently confirmed in an interview with edge Alum and sources Founder Alex Heath “None of these metrics are real… The ratings have become frankly noisy, and don’t show the true power of these models.” Nova 2 AI model family It launched earlier this month and tracks competition on some of these leaderboards.

Over the past couple of years, the perception has been that Amazon has struggled to keep up with the likes of Microsoft, Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Meanwhile, Alexa’s promised AI-powered overhaul has been plagued by delays It still doesn’t work as expected.

Now, DeSantis, who has spent the past three decades at Amazon, will head a more expansive team, while artificial intelligence researcher Peter Appel will lead Amazon’s frontier modeling research team. “The road ahead is full of opportunity,” Jassy writes. “With the foundation built, the traction we are seeing, and Peter’s leadership uniformly focused on these technologies, we are well positioned to lead and deliver meaningful capabilities to our customers.”