Amazon said to dedicate new team to train ambitious AI model codenamed ‘Olympus’
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Amazon is investing millions in training an ambitious large language model, hoping it could rival top models from OpenAI and Alphabet.
PHOTO: REUTERS
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SAN FRANCISCO - Amazon is investing millions in training an ambitious large language model (LLM), in the hope that it could rival top models from OpenAI and Alphabet, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.
The model, codenamed “Olympus”, has two trillion parameters, the people said, which could make it one of the largest models being trained.
OpenAI’s GPT-4 model
The people spoke on condition of anonymity because details of the project were not yet public.
Amazon declined to comment. The Information reported on the project name on Tuesday.
The team is spearheaded by Mr Rohit Prasad, former head of Alexa, who now reports directly to chief executive Andy Jassy.
As head scientist of general artificial intelligence (AI) at Amazon, Mr Prasad brought researchers who had been working on Alexa AI and the Amazon science team together to work on training models.
Amazon has already trained smaller models such as Titan. It has also partnered with AI model start-ups such as Anthropic and AI21 Labs, offering them to Amazon Web Services (AWS) users.
Amazon believes having home-grown models could make its offerings more attractive on AWS, where enterprise clients want to access top-performing models, sources said.
LLMs are the underlying technology for AI tools that learn from huge datasets to generate human-like responses.
Training bigger AI models is more expensive given the amount of computing power required.
In an earnings call in April, Amazon executives said that the company would increase investment in LLMs and generative AI while cutting back on fulfilment and transportation in its retail business. REUTERS
