For Bard and ChatGPT, the competition intensifies. Since the AI boom in late 2022, every major tech company today has been trying to develop or improve its artificial intelligence models to establish itself in this rapidly evolving field.
Amazon is no exception. Its latest venture, Project Olympus, is an ambitious initiative in a strategy aimed at competing with established giants in the field, such as OpenAI and Alphabet.
Aiming to develop one of the largest language models ever created, Amazon is embarking on a race for innovation that could redefine the rules of the game in the field of generative artificial intelligence.
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What is Olympus, Amazon’s artificial intelligence project
Project Olympus represents a turning point for Amazon in the field of artificial intelligence.
It is an ambitious large language model (LLM) designed to compete with more advanced AI models developed by giants such as OpenAI and Alphabet.
Amazon is investing considerable resources in this project, with the main goal of making Olympus the most advanced generative AI model ever. Thus overcoming current technological limitations and offering new possibilities for interaction and understanding.
The helm of this ambitious project is in the hands of Rohit Prasad, formerly head of Alexa, and now chief artificial general intelligence (AGI) scientist at Amazon.
Prasad brought together a team of experts from various areas of the company, including researchers from Alexa AI and Amazon’s science team. This multidisciplinary group combines experience and innovation, with the goal of pushing the boundaries of AI beyond traditional application areas.
How will Olympus work?
At the heart of the Olympus Project is an extraordinarily large Large Language Model (LLM). With its 2 trillion parameters, Olympus is set to be one of the largest language models ever developed, surpassing even OpenAI’s GPT-4 model, which has a trillion parameters.
This immense size is not only a symbol of computational power. But it also reflects the model’s ability to learn, understand and interact in more sophisticated and humanoid ways.
Such a vast model has the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with AI-based technologies, offering more precise, personalized and contextualized responses.
Amazon plans to use Olympus to further enhance its offerings on Amazon Web Services (AWS). The e-commerce giant believes that owning leading AI models can make AWS more attractive to enterprise customers seeking access to cutting-edge artificial intelligence technologies.
Olympus could be a catalyst for a wide range of applications. From advanced voice assistance systems to language analysis solutions for enterprises. Amazon already has experience with smaller AI models such as Titan. But with Olympus it aims to set a new standard in the industry.
Developing a model like Olympus requires a significant investment. Not only in financial terms but also in terms of computational power.
Training AI models of this scale is an expensive endeavor, as it requires a huge amount of data and computational resources. Amazon has already announced its intention to increase investment in LLM and generative AI while cutting costs in other areas such as logistics and transportation in its retail business.
Read also: The race for ultra-powerful AI: who will reach the 2 trillion parameter peak
