Tech companies are struggling to keep up in the race for AI supremacy and it seems Amazon is no different.
According to a report, the tech giant is secretly working on an AI chatbot that it hopes will draw users away from ChatGPT.
Amazon’s ‘ChatGPT killer’, named ‘Metis’ after the Greek god of wisdom, will likely launch at its fall product event, which is expected to take place in September.
When prompted, Metis will return conversationally updated text information as well as images.
But its capabilities will go even further by performing “complex” tasks like turning on the lights and booking a flight for you, acting as an “AI agent.”
Amazon is secretly preparing a ‘ChatGPT killer’ called ‘Metis’ that will return text ‘conversational’
The report was published by Business Insiderwho cites an “internal document” and “people familiar with the project” at Amazon.
“Amazon is working on a new artificial intelligence service to compete with ChatGPT,” he says.
“The tentative launch date for Metis is September, just as Amazon is hosting a big Alexa event.”
Like ChatGPT, Metis will be accessible through a web browser, the report states, but it could also be available through an Amazon app in due time.
Also like ChatGPT, Metis will feature ‘augmented recall generation’ – the ability to recall information beyond the original data it was trained on.
But Amazon wants to make it a smarter, more capable assistant than ChatGPT, creating an “AI agent” that focuses on more than just returning data.
With Metis, Amazon joins an already crowded AI chatbot market that was largely fueled by the popularity of ChatGPT.
It has already been revealed that Amazon plans to equip its smart assistant Alexa with more powerful artificial intelligence capabilities.
At the moment it is not clear if this is a separate project from Amazon or if Metis will somehow integrate with Alexa.
MailOnline has contacted Amazon for comment, but the tech giant is not expected to make any major public revelations before its September event.
In April, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy admitted that the company has been working on its own ‘LLMs’ or large language models: AIs that can understand and generate text in human language.
“Let’s just say that LLMs and generative AI will be a big business for customers, our shareholders and Amazon,” he said.
Amazon is planning a major Alexa revamp to include conversational generative AI. Alexa powers the company’s Echo smart speakers (pictured)
Business Insider says Amazon is “playing catch-up in the AI race,” particularly in consumer AI assistants, which have been “a missing spot” for the tech giant.
Its big tech rivals already have their own AI chatbots, including Google (Gemini) and X (Grok), while Microsoft and Apple now have integrations with ChatGPT.
Amazon has already introduced a chatbot called Q, although it helps with business queries and is not designed for general use in news, weather and facts.
His skills include summarizing meetings, explaining programming code, and locating information in hundreds of company documents.
