Amazon is planning a major upgrade to its Alexa voice assistant with generative AI later this year to keep pace with chatbots like those from OpenAI and Google, according to CNBC sources. The new version of Alexa will come with a monthly fee not included in the Prime subscription. Under founder Jeff Bezos, Alexa was considered an internal pet project, but lost priority with CEO Andy Jassy. Now, the Alexa team faces pressure to keep the voice assistant relevant. Amazon hopes to capitalize on Alexa's large installed device base. Challenges include the cost of generative AI and competition for AI talent. For the Alexa upgrade, Amazon wants to use its own large language model called Titan. Amazon is also said to be working on a cutting-edge language model codenamed Olympus, but there's been no word of it recently. Bezos is concerned that Amazon is falling behind in AI. Although he has stepped down as CEO, he remains very involved in Amazon's AI strategy, CNBC reports.
Hub AI in practice
Artificial Intelligence is present in everyday life – from “googling” to facial recognition to vacuum cleaner robots. AI tools are becoming more and more elaborate and support people and companies more effectively in their tasks, such as generating graphics, texting or coding, or interpreting large amounts of data.
What AI tools are there, how do they work, how do they help in our everyday world – and how do they change our lives? These are the questions we address in our Content Hub Artificial Intelligence in Practice.
Did Microsoft choose this slide wisely? Kevin Scott, Microsoft's CTO, just showed a graph at Microsoft's Build developer conference that was probably meant to illustrate the potential (?) exponential growth of AI. Taken at face value, the graph implies that an OpenAI AI model many times more capable than GPT-4 will be released this year. If the graph was created without thinking about future AI models, it begs the question of why Microsoft a) doesn't know better and b) wants to fuel AI hype only to disappoint people later. Soon after, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the stage and repeated what he's been saying for months: that AI models will get "smarter" with more training. Altman did not provide any specific information about GPT-5.
