Amazon's Secret AI Chatbot Metis Aiming at ChatGPT
TapTechNews June 25 - According to BusinessInsider, tech giant Amazon is secretly developing an AI chatbot with the code name Metis, aiming directly at OpenAI's well-known product ChatGPT.
TapTechNews noticed that the name of the project reveals a strong Greek mythology flavor. Metis is the goddess of wisdom in Greek mythology, and the underlying support for Metis is a powerful internal AI model named Olympus, whose name comes from Mount Olympus, the summit of the gods in Greek mythology. Insiders said that this is an upgraded version of Amazon's previously released Titan model with more powerful functions.
Internal documents show that Metis can answer text and image-related questions in an intelligent conversation way, provide corresponding information source links, recommend follow-up queries, and even generate images. More importantly, Amazon hopes that Metis can use an AI technology called retrieval-augmented generation, which will enable it to obtain information beyond its training data and generate the latest information. For example, Metis can provide the latest stock prices, while some chatbots without this technology cannot do this.
Metis can not only serve as an information assistant, but also be competent as an AI agent. This means that it can automatically perform complex tasks based on existing data, such as planning vacation itineraries, controlling smart home devices, and even booking flights.
Entering the AI assistant market, Amazon faces fierce competition. Microsoft and Google launched their own AI assistants as early as two years ago, and OpenAI has also invested heavily in its star product ChatGPT. In addition, there are also many AI start-ups such as Anthropic that are also providing similar chatbots and assistant products.
Compared with that, Amazon lags slightly behind in the AI assistant field. Its existing AI model Titan is considered to have less performance than its competitors, and the chatbot AmazonQ for enterprise customers has also received mixed reviews. Amazon's self-developed AI chips Trainium and Inferentia for AI model training have also got into trouble due to low demand and performance issues.
In order to speed up the training process of the AI model, Amazon even requires some employees to help crawl the open source data of GitHub. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy previously said that almost every department of the company is carrying out some form of AI project. Amazon is a pioneer in the cloud computing field and has been committed to the research of machine learning for many years. Jassy recently said that Amazon's AI projects are expected to generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue in the next few years and bring the company hundreds of billions of dollars in sales.
However, the consumer-level AI assistant is a weakness of Amazon. An internal document points out that Amazon currently lacks a product that can match ChatGPT. It is reported that Jassy is directly involved in the Metis project and regularly reviews the team's progress. The project is currently under internal testing.
The Metis project belongs to the General AI (AGI) team led by Amazon's AI general manager and chief scientist Rohit Prasad. Jassy said last year that the team will report directly to him to build Amazon's most ambitious AI model. Vice President Vishal Sharma is directly in charge of the Metis project.
It is worth noting that Amazon is also using the technical accumulation of its smart speaker Alexa to help the development of the Metis project. Many employees who originally worked in the Alexa AI team have been transferred to the Metis project, and some of the technologies of Metis also draw on the resources used by the upgraded version of Alexa with the code name remarkable Alexa. BusinessInsider reported as early as January this year that Amazon plans to launch a new paid version of Alexa supported by remarkable Alexa and a new web browser-based service.
The tentative release time of the Metis project is September, which coincides with the time when Amazon holds a large Alexa event, but the specific release time may change. Even so, some members of the Metis project team are still worried about whether the project can succeed. They believe that Amazon has missed the best time in the field of AI chatbots and have doubts about the resources and determination invested by the company.