Amazon is Working on Metis and nabs Adept AI talent
Amazon still feels behind in Generative AI. Alexa upgraded and Metis doing RAG is in the cards.
Hey Everyone,
Amazon’s work in LLMs and with upgrading Alexa have really been underwhelming in recent months and years. Sure they have Amazon Bedrock, have a bunch of vendors on AWS, but what they have released themselves has been underwhelming. There have also been a lot of layoffs and some executive confusion around their own vision of building LLM products.
To get some credibility back in my opinion, Amazon needs to at least:
Release an upgraded version of Alexa, and charge a subscription that can generate revenue.
Launch Metis, based on Amazon’s internal Olympus LLM.
Keep working with Anthropic and leverage it in its robotics department to compete directly with Tesla, Figure and Chinese robot makers.
Keep improving Amazon Bedrock and B2B Generative AI vendors and their scope in Agentic AI.
Turn Metis into a Search LLM bot that uses RAG in a similar way as Perplexity.
However in recent times, they outbid Microsoft for Adept AI. They are also leaning into automating their Finance. I had high hopes for Adept AI and startups like Imbue, these were supposed to be some of the startups who were first movers working on Agentic AI. On June 28th, 2024 we find out that Adept AI, a startup developing AI-powered “agents” to complete various software-based tasks, has agreed to license its tech to Amazon and the startup’s co-founders and portions of its team have joined the ecommerce giant. This sounds similar to what occurred with Inflection AI and Microsoft, who poached (acquired, whatever you want to call it) the majority of their talent.
Geekwire’s Taylor Soper first reported the news. Back in 2023 Amazon has been rumored to be working on its own LLM, code named “Olympus,” the rumored LLM was set to be one of the largest foundation models ever trained at an alleged 2 trillion parameters. Now they are supposedly working on Metis, and of course still working on Alexa’s overhaul with Generative AI, that is officially getting a bit late.
If we zoom out for all Microsoft and Google have done or accomplished in Generative AI, Apple and Amazon have accomplished very little and have been even slower than the likes of Alibaba and Baidu. Alibaba’s open-source models are now some of the best globally while Baidu apparently has over 300 million users, if we are to believe their numbers. Baidu have released Ernie 4.0 Turbo. While Amazon has invested up to $4 Billion in Anthropic, it seems not all of them will be significant players themselves.
This might cause AWS to lose marketshare to Microsoft Azure and maybe even be overtaken by 2030 the way things are going. However Amazon is making incredible progress in its digital advertising business compared with the likes of Microsoft or Apple. In their weird licensing deals the likes of Inflection AI and Adept AI still pretend they aren’t closing down shop.Zach Brock, head of engineering, is taking over as CEO as Adept refocuses its efforts on “solutions that enable agentic AI.” It’s not clear what Adept AI originally contributed to the space since they were founded.
The deal provides a lifeline for Adept, which has reportedly been in talks with Meta and Microsoft over the past few months about a potential acquisition. Microsoft previously invested in the startup. It’s been really awkward to see what’s happend to pioneers like Stability AI, Adept AI and Imbue. These were some of the most promising startups in Generative AI when things first started to kick off around two years ago.
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