Prasad previously served as the head scientist behind Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, a role he held from the product’s earliest days. When he was appointed to lead the new ambitious AGI effort after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, as part of a scramble to develop a competitive LLM that could help reinvigorate the Alexa voice assistant, it was led almost entirely by ex–Alexa executives.
“With our Nova 2 models just launched at Re:Invent, our custom silicon growing rapidly, and the advantages of optimizing across models, chips, and cloud software and infrastructure, we wanted to free Peter up to focus his energy, invention cycles, and leadership on these new areas,” Jassy wrote, adding that DeSantis would report directly to him.
Jassy also said that as part of the organizational change, Pieter Abbeel, an Amazon Distinguished Scientist in robotics who is also an AI and robotics professor at UC Berkeley, will lead the company’s frontier model research team. Abbeel came to Amazon in 2024 along with other cofounders of his robotics startup Covariant, in a deal that also saw Amazon licensing Covariant’s software, which included AI models that gave robots the ability to quickly adapt to new environments and tasks.
“Pieter is one of the world’s leading AI researchers and cofounder of Covariant, which pioneered the first commercial foundation model for robotics,” Jassy wrote. “His deep expertise in generative AI and reinforcement learning makes him well-suited to advance Amazon’s AI research as we push the boundaries of what’s possible for customers.”
The news of Prasad’s departure comes as somewhat of a surprise, given that he was recently at Amazon’s Re:Invent conference discussing the latest Nova models. However, over the past two years there has been significant media coverage suggesting that Amazon’s Alexa AI and AGI-related efforts have struggled and fallen behind competitors.
In addition, last week’s Amazon layoffs fueled concerns about whether Amazon was still lagging behind in AI, and whether the cuts reflected slowing growth. That came on the heels of comments in October by analyst Mark Shmulik of Bernstein, who said Amazon’s AWS was in “last place” in the AI cloud race.
