Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that Rohit Prasad — who led the company’s artificial general intelligence (AGI) since 2023, and was overseeing the development of the company’s Nova models — will depart by the end of the year.
Jassy also said that longtime Amazon Web Services (AWS) executive Peter DeSantis will lead a new organization that drives the development of its AI models, custom computer chips (which include its Graviton, Trainium, and Nitro chips), and quantum computing efforts. DeSantis has overseen the many teams designing AWS’s global infrastructure.
“With our Nova 2 models just launched at Re:Invent, our custom silicon growing rapidly, and the advantages of optimizing across models, chips, and cloud software and infrastructure, we wanted to free Peter up to focus his energy, invention cycles, and leadership on these new areas,” Jassy wrote, adding that DeSantis would report directly to him.
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Jassy also said that Amazon is restructuring its AGI unit and folding it into a larger, more unified organization. This new division will not only oversee advanced AI work but will also bring together Amazon’s silicon development and quantum computing teams under one roof.
According to Jassy, this move reflects the belief that Amazon has reached what he called an “inflection point” in AI and related technologies.
Jassy mentioned that as part of the organizational change, Pieter Abbeel, an Amazon Distinguished Scientist in robotics who is also an AI and robotics professor at UC Berkeley, will lead the company’s frontier model research team. Abbeel came to Amazon in 2024 along with other cofounders of his robotics startup Covariant, in a deal that also saw Amazon licensing Covariant’s software, which included AI models that gave robots the ability to quickly adapt to new environments and tasks.
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Prasad’s departure comes as a surprise as he was recently present at Amazon’s Re:Invent conference discussing the latest Nova models. However, according to Fortune, there has been significant news coverage in the past couple of years that suggest Amazon’s AI and AGI efforts are struggling, and have fallen behind competitors.
Prasad has previously served as head scientist behind Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. He was also appointed to lead the new ambitious AGI effort after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, as part of the efforts to develop a competitive LLM that would reinvigorate the Alexa voice assistant. This effort was almost entirely led by ex-Alexa executives. In his role, Prasad led a multidisciplinary team focused on advancing generalizable AI, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Prior to joining Amazon, Prasad had worked at Raytheon BBN Technologies for nearly 14 years. He served as deputy manager and senior director of the speech and multimedia business unit before exiting the company.