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Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) is investing millions in training a large language model in an effort to compete with the best AI models from the likes of Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI and Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL), Reuters reported citing people with expert knowledge.
The model, called Olympus, has two trillion parameters, the report said, which could make it one of the largest models being trained. OpenAI’s GPT-4 reportedly has one trillion parameters.
The team is led by Rohit Prasad, former head of Alexa, who now reports to Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy. As chief scientist of artificial general intelligence (AGI) at Amazon, Prasad brought together researchers who had worked on Alexa AI and the Amazon science team to train the models.
Amazon has already trained smaller models like Titan and said in September it would invest up to $4 billion in San Francisco-based AI startup Anthropic, taking a minority stake in the company. Amazon has partnered with Anthropic and AI21 Labs to offer services to Amazon Web Services, or AWS, users.
Google has also committed to investing $2 billion in Anthropic.
Amazon thinks having self-developed models can make its offering more attractive on AWS, where enterprise customers want access to high-performing AI models. However, according to the added report, there was no specific timeline for the launch of the new model.
In an April earnings call, Amazon executives noted that the company would increase investments in LLMs and generative AI while reducing fulfillment and transportation in its retail unit, the report said.
Generative AI services have taken the world by storm since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT last year. Companies worldwide have launched their own LLMs that can provide services such as content generation and images, to name a few.
Alibaba’s (BABA) Tongyi Qianwen 2.0 and Tongyi Wanxiang, Baidu’s (BIDU) Ernie Bot, OpenAI’s text-to-image tool DALL·E 3, Meta Platforms’ (META) AudioCraft, SeamlessM4T and Llama 2, Google’s Bard and Getty Images’ (GETY ) model called Generative AI from Getty Images, are some of the LLMs.