Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed a major AI development to employees, stating that Rohit Prasad—who has headed Amazon’s AGI (artificial general intelligence) team since 2023 and supervised the creation of the company’s Nova models—will leave at the year's end.

Prasad was the leading scientist for Amazon's Alexa voice assistant, a position he occupied since the product's inception. Upon his appointment to spearhead the new ambitious AGI initiative following the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, which aimed to create a competitive LLM to revitalize the Alexa voice assistant, the project was predominantly managed by former Alexa executives.

Jassy revealed that veteran Amazon Web Services (AWS) executive Peter DeSantis will head a new organization focused on advancing its AI models, proprietary computer chips (including Graviton, Trainium, and Nitro chips), and quantum computing initiatives. DeSantis has managed the numerous teams developing AWS’s worldwide infrastructure.

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“Following the recent launch of our Nova 2 models at Re:Invent, the swift growth of our custom silicon, and the benefits of optimization across models, chips, and cloud software and infrastructure, we aimed to allow Peter to concentrate his efforts, innovation cycles, and leadership on these new domains,” Jassy stated, also noting that DeSantis would report to him directly.

Jassy mentioned that as a part of the organizational shift, Pieter Abbeel, an Amazon Distinguished Scientist in robotics and an AI and robotics professor at UC Berkeley, will head the company’s frontier model research team. In 2024, Abbeel joined Amazon alongside other cofounders of his robotics startup Covariant, as part of a deal that involved Amazon licensing Covariant’s software, featuring AI models that enabled robots to swiftly adjust to new environments and tasks.

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According to Jassy, Pieter is a top AI researcher globally and co-founder of Covariant, known for developing the first commercial foundation model for robotics. His extensive knowledge in generative AI and reinforcement learning positions him perfectly to enhance Amazon’s AI research as we expand the limits of what’s achievable for customers."

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Prasad’s exit is quite unexpected, especially since he just participated in Amazon’s Re:Invent conference to talk about the new Nova models. Nonetheless, during the last two years, extensive media attention has indicated that Amazon's Alexa AI and AGI initiatives have faced challenges and lagged behind rivals.