Amazon upgrading its AI model to make Alexa world’s best personal assistant: CEO

Inspired by the ChatGPT success, Amazon is now building a large language model (LLM) to power Alexa that's much larger and much more "generalised and capable", which is going to rapidly accelerate the vision of offering the world's best personal assistant.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that ChatGPT is a good example of an application that's being built.

"We'll build some of those applications ourselves. So for instance, we think one of the most compelling applications that are going to be built in generative AI have to do with making developers much more effective with coding assistance," he noted during the company's quarterly earnings call.

"I think there's a significant business model underneath it," he added. The generative AI models have become bigger and better in the last couple of months, much more quickly. It really presents a remarkable opportunity to transform virtually every customer experience that exists and many that don't exist.

"We've been investing in building our own large language models for several years, and we have a very large investment across the company," said Jassy. In AWS, the company has 25-plus machine learning services "where we have the broadest machine learning functionality and customer base by a fair bit".

"It is deeply ingrained in our heritage," the Amazon CEO added. In AWS, the company has been working for several years on building customised machine learning chips.

Amazon Alexa also has millions of endpoints being used across entertainment and shopping and smart home and information and a lot of involvement from third-party ecosystem partners.

"I think when people often ask us about Alexa, what we often share is that if we were just building a smart speaker, it would be a much smaller investment. But we have a vision, which we have conviction about that we want to build the world's best personal assistant," said Jassy.