SEATTLE — Amazon today named Peter DeSantis as head of a new organization combining the company’s artificial general intelligence team and Amazon’s chipmaking unit and quantum computing research.
DeSantis has been with Amazon for 27 years and previously oversaw most engineering teams at Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing platform Amazon introduced in 2006.
“I believe we are at this inflection point with several of our new technologies that will power a significant amount of our future customer experiences,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a note to employees that was posted on the company’s website.
The new organization combines Amazon AI models like Nova and AGI with the company’s custom silicon development team, which is responsible for its quantum computing projects and manufacturing chips such as Graviton, Trainium, and Nitro.
Jassy’s memo said that AI researcher Pieter Abbeel, who joined the company last year from robotics startup Covariant, will lead the frontier model research team within the AGI organization while continuing to work with the robotics team.
Rohit Prasad, who has been leading Amazon’s AGI initiatives and led the speech science teams behind Alexa, is leaving the company at year’s end, Jassy said.
Thorvardur de Shong
