Amazon leader says new Gen AI Alexa is a ‘super agent’
In an interview with VentureBeat following yesterday’s Amazon announcement introducing the new large language model (LLM) powering its Alexa device, the company’s generative AI leader, Rohit Prasad, said Alexa is now a “super agent.”
Alexa’s LLM is now integrated with “thousands and thousands” of devices and services, said Prasad, who joined Amazon in 2014 as director of machine learning on Alexa and now is SVP and chief scientist, artificial general intelligence. He told VentureBeat at Amazon’s new second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia that the model connects to the largest set of APIs he could think of. That means that now Alexa is “grounded” in real-time knowledge that is useful and connected directly to users, he explained.
Amazon’s new Alexa as ‘momentous’ as the original
Though Amazon has been working with AI in Alexa and its other devices for years, the debut of what he called a “massive” state-of the art large language model, built with a decoder-only architecture, feels “as momentous as when we brought Alexa to life the first time [in 2014],” he said. But, he reiterated what Amazon devices chief Dave Limp said at the announcement event: “Our Northstar has been the same, we want that personal AI that can that you can interact with, naturally, that can do anything on your behalf.”
He emphasized that while the excitement around generative AI is “great — you want this kind of excitement in AI” — Amazon’s road to conversational dominance is quite different than chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude.
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“We are not a chatbot in a browser. You’re interacting with …it’s actually doing very useful things in the real world. There’s utility for creativity for brainstorming on the desktop and the browser, but that’s not [our] path.”
The multimodal, multilingual and multifaceted model is “is hugely complex,” he said, combining computer vision, natural language processing and pattern recognition. Yet, he added, it is the “complex being made simple” for users and developers.
Prasad refutes criticisms that Alexa was ‘dumb’
Amazon’s Alexa has been criticized in recent years for a general lack of usefulness — Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reportedly said in March that Alexa and its AI assistant ilk were “all dumb as a rock.” And in recent months Prasad has been forced to defend accusations that Amazon had missed out on the generative AI boom.
“I refute the comment that [Alexa was] dumb,” said Prasad. “We have hundreds of millions of customers using it, more than half a billion devices have been sold and interactions with Alexa have grown by 30%.” As a technologist who “knows the guts of the large language models,” he said that there is a big difference between tools like ChatGPT and devices like Alexa, which does “real things in the real world.”
That requires some of the powers of large language models, but making it even better for the home by integrating a personal context — like what do you like to listen to? What do you like to watch? Who’s your favorite team? Are you vegetarian?
“All that makes these LLMs far more useful and much smarter,” he said. “For example, if you said to Alexa, ‘it’s hot in here,’ if Alexa was not integrated with your personal context, it might say to go to the beach. But if you’re in a room, it knows that you have a connected thermostat, and should lower the temperature — so it’s not just going to generate cool responses or tell you things, but actually does things right.”
Addressing questions about privacy
Prasad addressed questions about data privacy — concerns that have dogged Alexa in the past, as well as other home devices like Roomba (Amazon signed an agreement last year to acquire Roomba’s owner, iRobot, but the deal has not yet closed).
“I don’t think you would put an AI in your home if you didn’t trust it,” said Prasad. “Privacy and trust is paramount.” Any collection of data, he emphasized, has to focus on customer permission.
“We’ve been very transparent from day one, what’s been collected [and] you can go and look at what has been collected,” he said. “And you can always go and check in your privacy dashboard of what is on or what is not on by default as well. That principle never changes.”
People should not forget that Alexa is an AI
But while Prasad is excited about Alexa’s new, more human-like and seamless capabilities, and recognizes that people almost take Alexa for granted, he emphasized that he never wants people to forget that Alexa — the device — is an AI.
“I want to be very transparent that Alexa is an AI,” he said. “I don’t know what will happen in terms of how it’s being adopted in homes in the future. But I can at least say that if there’s any point where people forget it’s an AI, then Alexa should remind people that it is an AI.”
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The ‘race starts today’ in search as Microsoft reveals new OpenAI-powered Bing, ‘copilot for the web’
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The “race starts today” in search, said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at a special event today at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington. “We’re going to move fast,” he added, as the company announced a reimagined Bing search engine, Edge web browser and chat powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and generative AI.
The new Bing for the desktop is available on limited preview. And Microsoft says it is launching a mobile version in a few weeks. There will be no cost to use the new Bing, but ads will be there from the start, according to Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined on stage at the event: “I think it’s the beginning of a new era,” he told the audience, adding that he wants to get AI into the hands of more people, which is why OpenAI partnered with Microsoft — starting with Azure and now Bing.
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He closed his comments by saying: “We’re eager to learn from real-world use.”
Microsoft announced new ‘AI-powered copilot’ experience
At the center of a new “AI-powered copilot” experience is a new Bing search engine and Edge web browser, said Mehdi.
Bing is running on a new, next-generation language model called Prometheus, he said, one more powerful than ChatGPT and one customizable for search (NOTE: So far, neither Microsoft nor OpenAI have referred to this more-advanced ChatGPT as the long-awaited GPT-4).
The Prometheus model, Mehdi said, offers several advances, including improvements in relevancy of answers, annotating answers with specific web links, getting more up-to-date information and improving geolocation, and increasing the safety of queries.
As a result, there have already been steady improvements on the Bing algorithm, he said. A few weeks ago, Microsoft applied AI to its core search index and saw the “largest jump in relevancy” over the past two decades.
Microsoft says it is ‘clear-eyed’ about unintended consequences of tech
In an introduction, Nadella said that, for Microsoft, these announcements are about being “clear-eyed” about the unintended consequences of technology, pointing to the company’s release of responsible AI principles back in 2016.
AI prompting, he explained, comes from human beings — Microsoft, he said, wants to take the design of AI products as a “first-class construct” and build that into our products. But that is insufficient, he added — the key is building AI that’s “more in line with human values and social preferences.”
Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s responsible AI lead, took the stage to emphasize that with technology this powerful, “I know we have a responsibility to ensure that it’s developed properly.” Fortunately, she added, at Microsoft “we’re not starting from scratch. We’ve been working on this for years. We’re also not new to working with generative AI.”
New Microsoft Bing experience
According to a Microsoft blog post, the new Bing experience is a culmination of four technical breakthroughs:
- Next-generation OpenAI model. We’re excited to announce the new Bing is running on a new, next-generation OpenAI large language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search. It takes key learnings and advancements from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 – and it is even faster, more accurate and more capable.
- Microsoft Prometheus model. We have developed a proprietary way of working with the OpenAI model that allows us to best leverage its power. We call this collection of capabilities and techniques the Prometheus model. This combination gives you more relevant, timely and targeted results, with improved safety.
- Applying AI to core search algorithm. We’ve also applied the AI model to our core Bing search ranking engine, which led to the largest jump in relevance in two decades. With this AI model, even basic search queries are more accurate and more relevant.
- New user experience. We’re reimagining how you interact with search, browser and chat by pulling them into a unified experience. This will unlock a completely new way to interact with the web.
Announcements come as Google and Microsoft offer dueling debuts this week
The announcements come after Google and Microsoft, in separate surprise announcements, confirmed dueling generative AI debuts this week.
Yesterday, Google unveiled a new ChatGPT-like chatbot named Bard, as it races to catch up in the wake of ChatGPT’s massive viral success (growing faster than TikTok, apparently). In a blog post, CEO Sundar Pichai said that Bard is now open to “trusted testers,” with plans to make it available to the public “in the coming weeks.”
In addition, the company announced a streaming event called Live from Paris focused on “Search, Maps and beyond,” to be livestreamed on YouTube at 8:30 am ET on February 8th. According to the description: “We’re reimagining how people search for, explore and interact with information, making it more natural and intuitive than ever before to find what you need.”
It was only ten weeks ago that OpenAI launched what it simply described as an “early demo”; a part of the GPT-3.5 series — an interactive, conversational model whose dialogue format “makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”
ChatGPT quickly caught the imagination — and feverish excitement — of both the AI community and the general public.
Since then, the tool’s possibilities — as well as its limitations and hidden dangers — have been well established. Rumors around Microsoft’s efforts to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, as well as productivity tools like PowerPoint and Outlook, have circulated for weeks. And any hints of slowing down its development were quickly dashed when Microsoft announced its plans to invest billions more into OpenAI on January 23.
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