Amazon will be entering the AI race as the e-commerce company is reportedly developing an AI chatbot to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT. The project, code-named 'Metis' after the Greek goddess of wisdom, will be accessible through a web browser, just like other AI assistants.
Metis is driven by an internal Amazon AI model known as Olympus, a name also drawn from Greek mythology. As per sources cited in a report by Business Insider, this model is a more advanced version of Amazon's publicly available Titan model.
Metis provides intelligent, conversational responses in both text and image formats. It can also share links to its sources, suggest follow-up questions, and generate images.
The e-commerce giant wants Metis to adopt AI technique known as retrieval-augmented generation. This will enable Metis to retrieve information beyond its initial training data from the Olympus model.
For now, the aim is largely focused on providing more up-to-date responses.
This development comes at a time when the AI war is heating up in the corporate space. Quite evidently, no company wants to be left behind in the AI race. Major competitors like Microsoft and Google launched their own AI assistants nearly two years ago, whereas OpenAI has been heavily investing in its leading ChatGPT for years. Anthropic and various other AI startups also provide their own chatbots and assistants.
While the company might be late to the party, it is striving to catch up. Its Titan model is reportedly less powerful as compared to its competitors. Amazon Q, a chatbot for corporate clients received mixed reviews. Its AI chips, Trainium and Inferentia, have faced challenges with low demand and performance issues.
Recently, Amazon even directed some employees to help scrape GitHub's open-source data to accelerate its AI model training process.
