How Amazon may be planning to take on OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot

Amazon is reportedly working on the development of a conversation AI chatbot that will directly compete with Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT. The company is said to use an AI technique that will provide responses along with links to the source of its answers.
Citing people familiar with the project and an internal document, a report by Business Insider says that the ‘secret’ project is code-named “Metis,” and is designed to be accessed from a web browser.OpenAI (ChatGPT), Microsoft (Copilot) and Google (Gemini) – all brought their chatbots on the web and later rolled out apps.

The report says that the chatbot will be powered by Amazon’s own AI model called Olympus – which is said to be a powerful version of the company's publicly available Titan model. Metis reportedly provides text and image-based answers in a conversational manner, and users can ask follow-up queries, the internal document said.
Amazon is reportedly developing Metis with an artificial-intelligence technique called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), the people said, adding that the chatbot will allow Metis to access and incorporate real-time information beyond its initial training data.
This translates to more current responses, such as providing the latest stock prices – a capability not available in many other chatbots, the person said. Metis may also work as an AI agent that is capable of automating and performing complex tasks based on existing data.
“Technically it will work, I guess, but the question is if it's already too late. We're playing chase,” one of the people was quoted as saying.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is said to be directly involved in Metis and recently reviewed the progress of the team. Amazon is building the AI chatbot under the leadership of its AGI team, headed by senior vice president and head scientist Rohit Prasad.
The report notes that Amazon may launch Metis in September, around the same time when Amazon hosts the Alexa event.