Report: Amazon secretly developing ChatGPT killer

Amazon, the e-commerce giant, is reportedly working on a new generative AI chatbot to directly compete and eventually overwhelm OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

According to Business Insider’s sources, the stealth internal project is code-named Metis, probably in reference to the Greek goddess of wisdom.

Internal Amazon documents obtained by the news outlet also said that the new service is going to be accessed from a web browser, similar to how other AI assistants work. “Metis” will be powered by an internal Amazon AI model called Olympus.

This is an allegedly more powerful version of the corporation’s publicly available Titan model. The latter will power Remarkable Alexa, a new, more capable version of Alexa, which will come with a monthly subscription fee.

Just like ChatGPT, Metis will supposedly engage users with smart, conversational answers. It will also share links to the source of its responses, generate images, and suggest follow-up queries.

The biggest difference between older AI chatbots and Metis will be its ability to use a technique called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), according to Business Insider.

This way, Metis will be able to retrieve information from beyond the original data used to train the underlying Olympus model.

This means more up-to-date responses like the latest stock prices or scientific revelations could be expected, while other chatbots still produce inaccurate or outdated information.

Finally, Metis will reportedly work as an AI agent, capable of automating and performing complex tasks based on existing data, such as booking flights or making vacation itineraries.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently said that the company’s AI initiatives were expected to generate more than $1 billion in annual revenue and to drive “tens of billions of dollars” in sales over the next few years.