AMAZON is rumored to be working on an AI assistant that can hold conversations, plan vacations, and book flights.
Insiders claim the tech giant is developing its first chatbot powered by artificial intelligence.
The story was broken by Business Insider, who cited "people familiar with the project" and branded the tool "a ChatGPT killer". Amazon itself has yet to comment on the rumors.
Sources claim Metis is fueled by an AI model called Olympus, which is said to be a more powerful version of the publicly available Titan model.
In its simplest form, Metis returns text- and image-based answers, according to internal documents. It can provide links to cite its sources and suggest follow-up questions.
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Amazon plans to implement a technique called retrieval-augmented generation, which combines the capabilities of a pre-trained model with an external dataset.
This means Metis will be able to pull information from beyond the original data used to train its underlying Olympus model.
It is intended to generate more up-to-date and accurate responses about current events.
Metis is also expected to work as a personal assistant that can automate and perform more complicated tasks.
It could be used to make a vacation itinerary, book a flight, and even turn on the lights in your house.
Despite the anticipated range of capabilities, it will face plenty of competition in both the chatbot and AI assistant spheres.
OpenAI's ChatGPT is an obvious example. This large language model can digest a wealth of text data scraped from the Internet or whatever else it is trained on.
At its best, the tool can acknowledge its own mistakes and reject inappropriate requests. It trains itself on human feedback through a process called reinforcement learning.
Earlier this week, ChatGPT became available as an app for all Mac users running macOS Sonoma or later.
It was previously exclusive to paid subscribers with ChatGPT's Plus premium plan.
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Users can toggle between the GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and GPT-4o language models, but the app also supports more specialized models available on web like the DALL-E image generator.
Other tech superpowers brought AI assistants to market last year, with Microsoft launching Copilot and Google introducing Bard.
However, companies continue to find other ways to integrate AI technology into all their products.
Google introduced a new Gemini side panel in the web version of Gmail on Monday.
The productivity tool can isolate unread emails, suggest responses, and search your inbox.
It is currently available for a limited number of paying subscribers but will roll out to other users in the coming weeks.
Earliest this month, industry analyst Paolo Pescatore revealed to The U.S. Sun how Silicon Valley giants are battling for a spot at the forefront of innovation.
"There’s clearly an arms race with the battle of who can shout the loudest on AI," he said.
"Google’s annual I/O developer conference was all about AI as it sought to reclaim some of the head start that OpenAI has undoubtedly opened up against all the other Big Tech companies in the field."
