{"id":355448,"date":"2025-12-18T05:40:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T05:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/355448\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T05:40:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T05:40:09","slug":"amazon-overhauls-ai-team-as-chief-declares-an-inflection-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/355448\/","title":{"rendered":"Amazon overhauls AI team as chief declares an \u2018inflection point\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free<\/p>\n

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.<\/p>\n

Amazon has announced a management shake-up, including the departure of its artificial intelligence chief, as the company prioritises catching up to rivals on their advanced chips and large language models. <\/p>\n

Chief executive Andy Jassy told employees the company had reached an \u201cinflection point\u201d with several technologies that required a renewed focus to \u201cmaximise potential for customers and Amazon<\/a> over the long term\u201d. <\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m excited about what this team will build and how these foundational technologies<\/a> will help shape Amazon\u2019s future,\u201d Jassy said. <\/p>\n

As part of the changes, Peter DeSantis, who previously headed up the company\u2019s data centre engineering teams, will oversee a new group leading Amazon\u2019s AI model development, chipmaking unit and quantum computing research, according to an employee memo published on Wednesday. <\/p>\n

The move will be followed by several other management changes, including the departure of Rohit Prasad, head of Amazon\u2019s large language model effort, at the end of the year. <\/p>\n

Prasad will be replaced by Pieter Abbeel, a former OpenAI researcher and founder of robotics start-up Covariant. <\/p>\n

Although the $2.4tn group\u2019s web services division is the leading provider of rented data centre processing and data storage, it lags rivals such as Google and Microsoft on the adoption of its own chips and models. <\/p>\n

The company\u2019s shares are up nearly 1 per cent in the year to date, compared with Google parent company Alphabet\u2019s 56 per cent leap and Microsoft\u2019s 14 per cent increase. <\/p>\n

Amazon is in talks to invest more than $10bn in OpenAI <\/a>as part of a deal that is expected to increase the adoption of its Trainium chips. The company released its most recent line of chips during a summit held in Las Vegas earlier this month, heralding its data-processing capabilities relative to leading chipmaker Nvidia\u2019s Blackwell series of high-performance chips.<\/p>\n

Recommended<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a><\/p>\n

Yet the customer base for Trainium is narrow, with the chips used mostly for the cloud giant\u2019s own work and the development of the Amazon-backed Anthropic\u2019s AI models. <\/p>\n

The Seattle-based group has positioned its Nova AI models to be more competitive on cost than rivals. However, Google and Microsoft have also invested heavily in their in-house model development, reflecting a desire to compete more aggressively on performance with start-ups such as Anthropic and OpenAI. <\/p>\n

Abbeel, who joined the company last year alongside Covariant\u2019s co-founder Peter Chen, would continue to work on robotics, the company said. David Luan, head of the company\u2019s AGI lab in San Francisco, will also remain in his post. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Unlock the Editor\u2019s Digest for free Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":355449,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[256,254,255,64,63,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-355448","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-au","12":"tag-australia","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=355448"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/355448\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/355449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=355448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=355448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=355448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}