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Amazon blew Alexa's shot to dominate AI, according to employees (2024)

Alexa desperately needs an LLM upgrade to compete with the new breed of chatbots from the likes of OpenAI and Google. But a lack of data and other obstacles have stymied Amazon's efforts.

He showed how in response to the new trigger phrase, “Alexa, let’s chat,” the digital assistant responded in a far more natural and conversational voice than the friendly-but-robotic one that hundreds of millions have become accustomed to communicating with for weather updates, reminders, timers and music requests. Many employees were still working remotely following the Covid pandemic, leading to people being endlessly “huddled on conference calls debating the minutiae of strategic PRFAQs” (Amazon-speak for ​​a written document used when proposing a product idea in its early stages), the Alexa AI project manager said. Right before the demo, Prasad, the Amazon SVP who had served as Alexa’s head scientist, was promoted to a new role designed to bring the company’s disparate research teams under a single umbrella, with a goal to develop human-level artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

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