Amazon launched its voice-first digital assistant Alexa to the world in November 2014. The know-how’s identify is claimed to be impressed by Star Trek’s pc system onboard the Starship Empire and underscored CEO Jeff Bezos’ ambition of making a conversational and clever assistant. Nevertheless, a report claims that regardless of a tech demo final yr exhibiting a contextually conscious Alexa, it’s nowhere near being built-in with synthetic intelligence (AI) to be smarter. A former Amazon worker who was engaged on Alexa AI has additionally highlighted information silos and fragmented organisation buildings being detrimental to Alexa’s development.
Former Amazon worker highlights points with enhancing Alexa
In an extended submit on X (previously often known as Twitter), Mihail Eric, who labored as Amazon’s Senior Machine Studying Scientist at Alexa AI between 2019 and 2021, shared his expertise of working within the firm and the challenges he confronted. He additionally defined why Alexa was a venture doomed for failure.
Highlighting the “unhealthy technical course of” within the firm, Eric stated the corporate had a really fragmented organisational construction, which meant getting knowledge to conduct coaching for giant language fashions (LLM). “It could take weeks to get entry to any inside knowledge for evaluation or experiments. Information was poorly annotated. Documentation was both nonexistent or stale,” he added.
He additionally stated that completely different groups have been engaged on equivalent points, which created an environment of inside competitors which was not productive. Additional, he discovered managers weren’t fascinated by collaborating on initiatives that didn’t reward them.
Within the submit, Eric shared a number of cases the place the organisation construction and insurance policies got here in the way in which of creating “an Amazon ChatGPT (nicely earlier than ChatGPT was launched).”
Amazon staff reportedly spotlight Alexa’s struggles
Fortune printed an extended report the place it cited greater than a dozen unnamed Amazon staff to focus on the problems the corporate is going through in integrating AI capabilities into the digital assistant. One specific difficulty that surfaced was that Alexa’s present capabilities make it tougher to combine a contemporary tech stack.
Reportedly, Alexa is educated to reply in “utterances”, which basically implies that it was created to reply to a consumer command and announce that it was operating the requested command (or that it couldn’t perceive the consumer). In consequence, Alexa was not programmed for back-and-forth dialog.
The publication cited a former Amazon machine studying scientist, who defined that the mannequin additionally resulted in Amazon clients studying a extra environment friendly approach of speaking with the digital assistant, which was to offer a brief immediate for the motion. This created one other downside. Regardless of having lots of of hundreds of thousands of customers who actively converse with Alexa each day, the info is fitted to utterance coaching and never conversations. This has reportedly created an enormous knowledge hole within the organisation.
Additional, the report claims that Alexa is a value centre for Amazon, and the corporate loses billions every year because the know-how can’t be monetised but. In the meantime, Amazon Internet Companies (AWS) has an AI assistant dubbed Amazon Q which is obtainable to particular enterprises as an add-on and generates cash. Over time, the Amazon Q division has seen extra investments and even integration with Anthropic’s Claude AI mannequin. Nevertheless, Alexa’s AI staff was not given entry to Claude attributable to knowledge privateness issues.
When Fortune reached out to Amazon, a spokesperson reportedly denied the claims and stated these particulars offered by staff have been dated and didn’t replicate the division’s present state of LLM growth. Whereas that could be true, the extra conversational Alexa seen on the tech demo final yr is but to be launched to the general public by the tech big.