E-commerce giant Amazon is putting a substantial amount of resources into making its own AI chatbot called Olympus. Insiders familiar with the matter told Reuters that the company is investing millions of dollars in training its ambitious Large Language Model (LLM) that will rival Google Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Olympus is meant to be integrated with its online store as well as its Alexa smart speakers. It could be unveiled as soon as December as the company looks to catch up with the ongoing AI arms race.

Reuters’ sources report that Olympus has 2 trillion parameters, which puts it ahead of OpenAI’s GPT 4, which reportedly has 1 trillion. Needless to say, this would make Olympus one of the largest AI models available. The people reporting this chose to stay anonymous since this information is not publicly available as of yet.

In Language Model Models (LLMs), parameters refer to internal variables that aid AI in making decisions and predictions. These parameters collaborate to encode linguistic information and interpret intricate language data. Modifying these parameters throughout the training process can improve the AI’s proficiency in language processing and comprehension of new concepts.

The development team for Olympus is led by the former head of Alexa, Rohit Prasad. In his role as the head scientist of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) at Amazon, Prasad assembled a team of researchers previously involved in Alexa AI and the Amazon science team. This collaborative effort aimed to focus on training models and consolidating AI initiatives across the company with dedicated resources.

This isn’t the first time Amazon is working on AI models as the company has also developed similar models in the past such as Titan. Titan’s launch was reportedly delayed due to technical issues and the announcement of ChatGPT, which Amazon executives thought was far superior to Titan.

Amazon has been also working with AI startups as well including Anthropic and AI21 Labs, offering them to Amazon Web Services (AWS) users. Amazon invested a substantial $4 billion into Anthropic back in September this year.

More information about Olympus should surface as its launch date draws near. Stay tuned.