Watch Out, Chatbots! Amazon Metis is Almost Here

With Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet currently leading the chatbot race, tech giant Amazon wishes not to be left behind. The company has entered the chatbot competition, developing its own consumer-focused AI chatbot, Metis, which will be unveiled later this year. 

The chatbot will be available via a web browser and powered by one of the company's proprietary AI models, Olympus. According to reports, Olympus outperforms Amazon's publicly available AI model Titan.

The RAG Advantage

In a market packed with chatbots like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Anthropic's Claude, Meta's Llama, and Perplexity.ai, the most pressing question is, "What can Amazon do differently?" Amazon is late to the AI game, and with so many already established names, simply matching the competition will not suffice.

Amazon’s Metis will use retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to tap into information beyond the data on which its model was built. For example, Metis should be able to provide the most recent stock values, which non-RAG chatbots cannot.

RAGs merge information retrieval with natural language selection, allowing AI to access and incorporate specific external facts into its replies, increasing their effectiveness and accuracy.

"The main advantage of RAGs over LLMs is that the former is based entirely on a proprietary dataset that the owner of the RAG can control, allowing for more targeted applications," Renat Abyasov, the CEO of AI business, Wonderslide, said in an interview.

Using RAG also offers real-world advantages. According to a recent study published in the NEJM AI journal, RAG can significantly increase the performance of LLMs in answering medical inquiries.

Once a business like OpenAI, Google, or Amazon has trained an AI model on a large dataset for weeks or months, there is usually no way to update the model with fresh information. RAG overcomes this by supplementing an AI output with external data.

Roadblocks Continue? 

Despite ambitious expectations, reports indicate that Amazon's AI-powered version of its virtual assistant, Alexa, still needs to be prepared. Former employees claim that Amazon needs more data and chips to run the LLM that powers the new Alexa.

However, Amazon has denied these allegations, claiming that these former employees are unaware of the company's current Alexa AI activities.

Amazon’s founder and former CEO, Jeff Bezos, has said that Amazon needs to catch up in the AI race. He was concerned about keeping pace with rivals OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.

Bezos has also been emailing Amazon executives to inquire why more AI startups are not using its cloud services.

While the debate over Amazon's performance in AI continues, the corporation has made significant strides in AI service delivery.

In November, Amazon released a preview of Amazon Q, a generative AI assistant that can be tailored to specific organisations. According to reports, Amazon is working on an improved version of Alexa that will use its Titan AI model.

With the anticipated launch of Metis, Amazon is poised to dispel any notion of 'falling behind in the AI technological race’. This AI chatbot, coupled with the recent progress in AI service delivery, could mark a significant turning point for the international tech behemoth.