Amazon Appoints New Head for AGI Team Amid AI Race

Amazon’s head of artificial general intelligence (AGI), Rohit Prasad, is set to depart the company next year as it reaches a pivotal moment in its tech development, as announced by CEO Andy Jassy. In this transition, Peter DeSantis, a senior vice president at Amazon Web Services, will take charge of a new division dedicated to the company’s cutting-edge AI models, chip innovation, and quantum computing.

Prasad joined Amazon in 2013 and was instrumental in shaping the evolution of the voice assistant, Alexa. He also led the launch of the Amazon Nova AI models and took the reins of the AGI team in 2023. While other AI leaders boast about their performance on various benchmarks, Prasad recently pointed out in an interview that “None of these benchmarks are real… The evals are frankly getting noisy, and they’re not showing the real power of these models.” The Nova 2 AI model family debuted earlier this month but lags behind competitors on some of those leaderboards.

In recent years, there has been a perception that Amazon has struggled to keep pace with tech giants like Microsoft, Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Additionally, Alexa’s anticipated AI-driven enhancements have faced delays and have yet to meet expectations.

Now, DeSantis, who has dedicated the last three decades to Amazon, will lead a broader team, while AI researcher Pieter Abbeel will oversee Amazon’s frontier model research team. Jassy expressed optimism about the future, stating, “The path ahead is full of opportunity. With the foundation that’s been built, the traction we’re seeing, and Peter’s leadership bringing unified focus to these technologies, we’re well-positioned to lead and deliver meaningful capabilities for our customers.”