Sebastian Herrera of The Wall Street Journal reports that Rohit Prasad is tasked with making the company a stronger rival to the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google. Herrera writes:
As one of the chief architects of Amazon’s Alexa, Rohit Prasad has been at the vanguard of artificial intelligence. Now, he is leading the company’s effort to catch up in the AI race.
The Seattle company was taken aback by a surge in competitors’ AI capabilities. It turned to Prasad to upgrade the technology for its Alexa voice assistant and reboot the company’s AI ambitions.
Alexa—which is integrated into more than 500 million devices around the world—has been one of the dominant AI assistants, along with Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant. OpenAI released ChatGPT, and the AI race’s rules changed.
Amazon put thousands of people in a new team under Prasad to develop AI products for an Alexa upgrade and other businesses. The company has been building its own large language models—the software behind generative AI—and it is taking time to train and fine-tune the powerful technology. […]
Amazon’s competitors have also been launching chatbots and upgrading the capabilities they have.
Apple recently unveiled its Apple Intelligence system with a souped-up version of its Siri assistant. The system will be available on the company’s new iPhone 16 models. Google recently introduced a new generative-AI assistant for its phones.
Read more here.
