Amazon's leaked email exposed that the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team of Amazon Inc., established four months ago, is undergoing a reorganization.
According to the email, the AGI team, led by Amazon's SVP and chief scientist Rohit Prasad, is reallocating some Alexa-focused initiatives to the Devices unit.
The Alexa division has been significantly impacted by the reorganization, which immediately occurred after layoffs were implemented within the AGI team last week.
Amazon's Leaked Email Reveals Significant Restructuring
Prasad is highly pleased with this organization's progress thus far for Alexa and AGI. He added that the modifications will "enable us to deliver to our customers more quickly and with a greater sense of purpose.
The AGI team has outlined six focus areas in light of the reorganization. These areas show Amazon's plan to fight with Microsoft and Google in AI. The business wants to improve its base models, AI personal helpers that can have conversations, and related support services.
The Devices team now comprises the former Alexa-centric feature development teams. In contrast, AGI Product, AGI Data Services, AGI Foundational Models, AGI Sensory and Machine Learning Builder Services, AGI Conversational Assistant Services, and AGI Information are the six new teams established by the AGI unit.
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Amazon Layoffs Hundreds of Employees in the AGI Division
Meanwhile, in an internal memo on Friday, Daniel Rausch, Vice President of Alexa and Fire TV, announced the layoff of more than 180 employees as the company refocuses its Alexa division to prioritize generative artificial intelligence.
These workers are from the gaming division.
Rausch said it was hard to make this choice, but they are still hopeful about Alexa's future. He emphasized that Alexa remains a highly vital part of their business, and he is proud of their innovation.
Alexa is a cloud-based voice service developed by Amazon and is accessible on over 100 million devices manufactured by Amazon and third-party entities. People can create natural voice experiences with Alexa that provide users with a more intuitive means of interacting with the technology they routinely encounter.
It provides documentation, reference solutions, APIs, and a collection of tools that facilitate development for Alexa.
Moreover, Amazon initiated phases of layoffs a year ago, with an anticipated total impact of 27,000 personnel by March 2023. As reported in state documents, the company terminated 1,852 workers in Seattle and 448 in Bellevue.
About Amazon's AGI Team
AGI Team aims to develop the world's most advanced Artificial General Intelligence, which will benefit humanity and empower all Amazon businesses to provide more excellent value to their customers. AGI foundational services and models apply to all Amazon enterprises.
AGI Data Services is an integral part of the AGI organization. They help build, test, and teach AI models by creating, collecting, and analyzing data. This group makes "ground truth" data to train machine learning models on what to do.
The team works with different data types, like audio, video, and pictures, and packages it so internal users (like the data modeling and product teams) can use it.
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