Amazon is creating a new multimodal AI system called Olympus that focuses on image and video analysis.
The visual focus aims to make up for the company's limitations in text processing and solving complex problems, where it lags OpenAI and Anthropic's models, according to a report from The Information citing multiple sources familiar with the project.
Sources say Olympus goes far beyond basic video AI capabilities. The system can track movement in sports footage with high accuracy, such as the exact moment a basketball leaves a player's hand, and estimate the trajectory, replacing work typically done by human analysts.
It's also capable of searching video archives with high accuracy. This capability could appeal to sports analytics firms and media companies managing large video libraries. Industrial applications could include AI-powered inspections of underwater drilling equipment to find corrosion or leaks.
Combining text with visual models
Late last year, Amazon's AI chief Rohit Prasad laid out plans for four large text models, sources told The Information. Two notable models in development include one with 400 billion parameters and another with two trillion parameters—larger than the original GPT-4. While parameter count matters less now due to new efficiency techniques, it still provides a rough measure of model capability.
At the time, Amazon planned to pair those text models with a smaller visual processing model. The exact technical details behind Olympus remain under wraps for now, though the company may reveal more at next week's AWS re:Invent cloud conference.
Boosting AWS cloud appeal
It makes sense for Amazon to keep investing in its own models, even after putting $8 billion into Anthropic. Major cloud providers need exclusive AI offerings alongside standard options to attract customers. As Microsoft works with OpenAI and Google builds Gemini, Amazon wants its own edge in the market.
Like Google, Microsoft, and Meta, Amazon is developing its own AI chips to reduce its dependence on Nvidia's pricing control and chip shortages in the AI chip market. With its own models and those from Anthropic, Amazon would have clear use cases for these custom chips.
