Rohit Prasad, Senior Vice President and Head Scientist for Amazon Alexa, takes center stage during day 1 of Web Summit 2022 at Altice Arena in Lisbon, Portugal.
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Rohit Prasad, Top Amazon The company confirmed Wednesday that the executive overseeing its artificial general intelligence division will leave at the end of this year.
As part of the move, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a blog post that the company will reorganize its AGI division under a broader division that also includes its silicon development and quantum computing teams. The new division will be led by Peter DeSantis, who has worked at Amazon for 27 years and is currently the company’s senior vice president of cloud.
Jassy said the company believes it has reached a “tipping point” in technology and is restructuring its AI team.
Amazon is trying to overcome the perception among some industry watchers that it lags behind competitors in developing AI products. The company released its own underlying model called Nova to compete with OpenAI. google And humanity. It also makes its own Trainium custom AI chips that compete with Nvidia.
“With the foundation we have built, the traction we are seeing, and Peter’s leadership in bringing a unified focus to these technologies, we are well-positioned to lead and deliver meaningful capabilities to our customers,” Jassy wrote. “I’m excited to see what this team will build and how these foundational technologies will help shape the future of Amazon.”
He noted that DeSantis will report directly to Jassy. The company also plans to name Peter Abbeer, who joined Amazon in 2024 after acquiring robotics startup Covariant, to lead Amazon’s frontier modeling research team within AGI Group.
Mr. DeSantis joined Amazon in 1998, starting as general manager in the early days of Amazon Web Services and rising to senior vice president in 2016. According to his LinkedIn page, for the past four years he has led AWS compute product teams including compute, storage, database, security, and custom chip development.
Prasad, who joined Amazon in 2013, was Alexa’s chief scientist until he was tapped to lead the company’s AGI development in August.
Jassy said in the memo that Prasad was “a missionary, passionate and selfless man, and we are grateful for his leadership, technical vision and everything he has built here.”
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