• by Laurie Sullivan , 3 hours ago

Amazon has reorganized teams working on projects around artificial intelligence (AI), taking top leaders from its cloud division to run the new division.

Peter DeSantis, a 27-year Amazon veteran, will lead the new group, Amazon Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy wrote in a letter to employees that was also posted on the company’s blog. Jassy has been spearheading the push into everything AI.

DeSantis aims to consolidate "full-stack" capabilities, from custom chips to Alexa, to improve performance in the ad ecosystem as well as efficiencies and automation.

The new organization, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), combines the Artificial General Intelligence team overseeing the company’s Nova-branded AI models with the operations of the Alexa voice assistant, and its chipmaking unit and quantum computing research.

Pieter Abbeel will lead Amazon’s frontier model research team, which builds the base model of AI in artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Abbeel cofounded Covariant, which pioneered the first commercial foundation model for robotics.

Abbeel steps in for Rohit Prasad, the former head of AGI at Amazon, who will leave at the end of 2025. Prasad joined Amazon in 2013, during the early days of Alexa, to help us build a conversational AI.