Amazon’s head of artificial general intelligence (AGI), Rohit Prasad, is leaving the company next year as it has reached an “inflection point” in the development of the technology. CEO Andy Jassy announced on WednesdayAs part of the change, Peter DeSantis, senior vice president of Amazon Web Services, will lead a new division focused on the company’s most advanced AI models, chip development and quantum computing,
Prasad joined Amazon in 2013 and played a key role in the development of the company’s voice assistant Alexa. He also oversaw the launch of the Amazon Nova AI model and later became the head of the AGI team in 2023. While other AI giants rave about their performance on various AI benchmarks, Prasad emphasized in a recent interview the verge alum and sources say Founder Alex Heath stated that “None of these benchmarks are realistic…Evals are clearly noise, and they are not showing the real power of these models.” Nova 2 AI Model Family Launched earlier this month and some of them are lagging behind the competition on the leaderboard.
Over the past few years, the perception has been that Amazon has struggled to keep pace with companies like Microsoft, Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Meanwhile, the promised AI-powered overhaul of Alexa was beset by delays and is still not performing as expected.
Now, DeSantis, who has spent the last three decades at Amazon, will lead a more expansive team, while AI researcher Peter Abele will lead Amazon’s Frontier Model research team. “The path ahead is full of opportunities,” writes Jesse. “With the foundation that has been laid, the traction we are seeing, and the integrated focus that Peter’s leadership has brought to these technologies, we are well-positioned to lead and deliver meaningful capabilities for our customers.”
