Amazon is working on an AI chatbot codenamed "Metis". The internal project is meant to be Amazon's answer to ChatGPT.
According to a report by Business Insider, Amazon is developing an AI chatbot that will compete directly with OpenAI's ChatGPT. The internal project is code-named "Metis," which is presumably a reference to the Greek goddess of wisdom. The new service will be accessible via a web browser and, like its competitors, will provide text and image-based responses. Metis will also be able to provide links to the sources of its answers, suggest follow-up questions, and generate images.
Amazon also plans to use Retrieval Augmented Generation to give Metis access to information beyond the original training data of the underlying Olympus model. The goal is to generate more current answers, such as the latest stock prices.
Amazon's Metis and Remarkable Alexa teams work closely together
Metis will also act as an AI agent and be able to automate complex tasks, such as planning a vacation, turning on the lights, or booking a flight. According to the report, Metis uses technologies that will be included in a new version of Alexa, internally dubbed "Remarkable Alexa." Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is directly involved in Metis and recently reviewed the team's progress, according to Business Insider. The project is part of Amazon's AGI team, which is led by chief scientist Rohit Prasad.
Metis is based on Amazon's internal AI model Olympus, a more powerful version of the publicly available Titan model. Olympus is said to have "hundreds of billions of parameters" and is expected to outperform Anthropics Claude 3 after training, according to a report in The Verge. It will be integrated into nearly every part of Amazon and made available to other companies through AWS.
According to the report, the tentative launch date for Metis is September - when Amazon is also planning a major Alexa event.
