Report: Amazon is Working on ‘Metis’ ChatGPT-Like Chatbot

Amazon is reportedly working on a new AI chatbot for consumers that could be officially revealed in September. According to a report from Business Insider citing people familiar with the matter and an internal document, the new chatbot is codenamed ‘Metis’, and it’s being built with a new internal ‘Olympus’ model that’s more powerful than the company’s existing Titan AI model.

As you may remember, Amazon already launched Q, an AI chatbot for enterprise customers, and the company is also hard at work on a paid version of Alexa with generative AI features that was first teased in September 2023. The new voice assistant, which is reportedly called “Remarkable Alexa” internally, could be priced at around $5/month, according to a recent report from Reuters.

Business Insider is now reporting that Amazon is leveraging this work on “Remarkable Alexa” to develop its new Metis AI chatbot. “Many employees working on Metis moved over from Alexa’s AI team, and Metis’ technology uses some of the resources found in the upgraded version of Alexa,” two of the people told BI.

Amazon is said to be well aware that it’s playing catch up to OpenAI and its competitors in the generative AI space. Still, the company is reportedly determined to catch up. Sources told BI that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is directly involved in the development of Metis, which could be part of Amazon’s big hardware and services event in the fall.

In practice, Metis will work like other AI chatbots with conversational answers that link to sources, and it will also offer image generation capabilities. However, the report describes how Metis could also use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), an AI technique to provide more up-to-date responses than the competition. “For example, Metis should be able to share the latest stock prices, while some other chatbots that are not RAG can’t do so, the people familiar with the situation said.”

Metis could also function as an “AI agent” that can perform complex tasks like booking a flight or planning a vacation itinerary. There could well be some overlap with Alexa, even though Amazon’s digital assistant currently lacks a web interface.

Just like Apple, Amazon is a latecomer to the generative AI race despite playing an important role in the development of digital assistants with Alexa. While the latter is still going through a big revamp to keep up with the times, OpenAI’s new GPT-4o model recently turned ChatGPT into an impressive human-sounding assistant that can reason across audio, vision, and text in real-time.