- Amazon CEO Andy Jassy promoted Rohit Prasad, SVP and head scientist for Alexa, to his direct report.
- Prasad is now running a newly created AI team at Amazon.
- The company is rushing to keep pace with OpenAI, Google and Microsoft in the AI race.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy now has direct oversight of a new group that’s working on the company’s most ambitious artificial intelligence project, Insider has learned.
Jassy told Amazon’s S-team, a group of over two dozen top executives, that he promoted Rohit Prasad, SVP and head scientist for Alexa, as his direct report. In this role, Prasad will lead a newly created group working on the company’s “most ambitious” large language models, according to an internal email obtained by Insider.
LLMs are the underlying technology for AI tools that learn from huge datasets to generate human-like responses. Companies including OpenAI, Google, and Meta have built massive, powerful LLMs that have wowed the tech world. Amazon also has its own, including Alexa Teacher Model and Titan.
In the email, from late June, Jassy said Prasad would lead a “central team” building Amazon’s “most expansive” LLMs.
“Short note to share that Rohit is going to move to a new role leading a central team building our most expansive Large Language Models,” Jassy said in the email. “While we’ve built several LLMs around the company, and have several others in flight, we are going to pool some resources centrally to build our most ambitious LLMs — and Rohit will lead this team. In this new role, Rohit will report to me.”
Amazon’s spokesperson didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Amazon is rushing to respond to the sudden rise of generative AI, as Insider previously reported. While Amazon has worked on various AI technologies for decades, rival companies, like Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google, have taken an early lead. Meta’s latest Llama 2 model is also making waves across the industry.
As part of its AI effort, Amazon recently created a new team under AWS focused on helping customers use generative AI, as Insider previously reported. AWS also unveiled new AI products like Bedrock, a service that makes other foundational models accessible, and Code Whisperer, an AI coding tool that came out in 2022.
Prasad has been a top executive of the Alexa team for over 10 years, and Amazon has recently launched a new project to make Alexa smarter and more personal using ChatGPT-like technologies, Insider previously reported.
Prasad was also part of Dave Limp’s devices and services team at Amazon, and he will continue to be engaged in that part of the business, too. Shortly after Jassy’s announcement in June, Limp told his team that Prasad would remain a “key partner and champion of Alexa and play an important role in the future of our business,” according to a separate email seen by Insider. Daniel Rausch, a devices VP, will take on the Alexa product and business organizations, including the entertainment, partner engagement, and international teams, the email said.
“Our mission and vision for Alexa are unchanged, and I am more optimistic than ever about our ability to invent for customers,” Limp said in the email.
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