Amazon Leader Declares New Gen AI Alexa as a ‘Super Agent’

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In an interview with VentureBeat following yesterday’s Amazon announcement introducing the new large language model (LLM) powering its Alexa device, the company’s generative AI leader, Rohit Prasad, said Alexa is now a “super agent.”

Alexa’s LLM is now integrated with “thousands and thousands” of devices and services, said Prasad, who joined Amazon in 2014 as director of machine learning on Alexa and now is SVP and chief scientist, artificial general intelligence. He told VentureBeat at Amazon’s new second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia that the model connects to the largest set of APIs he could think of. That means that now Alexa is “grounded” in real-time knowledge that is useful and connected directly to users, he explained.

Amazon’s new Alexa as ‘momentous’ as the original

Though Amazon has been working with AI in Alexa and its other devices for years, the debut of what he called a “massive” state-of the art large language model, built with a decoder-only architecture, feels “as momentous as when we brought Alexa to life the first time [in 2014],” he said. But, he reiterated what Amazon devices chief Dave Limp said at the announcement event: “Our Northstar has been the same, we want that personal AI that can that you can interact with, naturally, that can do anything on your behalf.”

He emphasized that while the excitement around generative AI is “great — you want this kind of excitement in AI” — Amazon’s road to conversational dominance is quite different than chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude.