Amazon has a new leader for its ‘AGI’ group as it plays catch-up on AI

Amazon’s head of artificial general intelligence (AGI), Rohit Prasad, is leaving the company next year as it reaches an “inflection point” in its development of the technology, CEO Andy Jassy announced on Wednesday. As part of the change, Peter DeSantis, a senior vice president at Amazon Web Services, will helm a new division focused on the company’s most advanced AI models, chip development, and quantum computing.

Prasad joined Amazon in 2013 and played a key role in the evolution of the company’s voice assistant Alexa. He also oversaw the launch of the Amazon Nova AI models and later became the head of the AGI team in 2023. While the other AI giants tout their performance on various AI benchmarks, Prasad recently emphasized in an interview with Verge alum and Sources founder Alex Heath 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 launched earlier this month and trails the competition on some of those leaderboards.

Over the past couple of years, the perception is that Amazon has struggled to keep up with the likes of Microsoft, Google, Meta, and OpenAI. Meanwhile, Alexa’s promised AI-powered overhaul was beset by delays and still isn’t performing as expected.

Now, DeSantis, who has spent the last three decades at Amazon, will head up a more expansive team, while AI researcher Pieter Abbeel will lead Amazon’s frontier model research team. “The path ahead is full of opportunity,” Jassy writes. “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.”