Amazon is building a new AI chatbot to rival ChatGPT

Amazon is finally getting serious about taking on ChatGPT directly.

According to an internal document obtained by Business Insider, the tech giant is developing a new conversational AI chatbot codenamed Metis. Powered by a new in-house model dubbed Olympus rather than the older Titan series, Metis could launch as soon as September alongside Amazon's typical fall hardware event.

Executive weight and Alexa muscle

This is not a rogue side project. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is directly involved in Metis' development, alongside Rohit Prasad, a senior vice president and head scientist of the company's AGI division.

The engineering team reportedly draws heavily from veteran Alexa AI staff. Much of the tech is said to borrow directly from their work on the upcoming Remarkable Alexa voice assistant revamp.

Technically, Metis heavily leverages retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). By redirecting the language model to pull from external knowledge sources, APIs, and document repositories, Metis is designed to deliver fresh data and more precise answers without requiring constant, expensive model retraining.

The ghost of ChatGPT

Despite the horsepower behind it, skepticism is already leaking from inside Amazon's own walls.

One unnamed source quoted in the report noted that while the chatbot will likely work from a technical standpoint, the real question is whether it is already too late. OpenAI launched ChatGPT back in November 2022, and Google countered with Bard (now Gemini) in March 2023. Amazon has struggled with the perception that its Titan models lag behind rival frontier models, even as it pushed enterprise tools like Amazon Q.

Targeting a September debut gives Amazon just a couple of months to polish Metis for prime time.

Why it matters

We think launching a standalone chatbot in late 2024 feels painfully overdue, but Amazon has an angle that pure-play AI labs still lack: hardware real estate.

If Metis is just another chat window on the web, few users will switch away from ChatGPT or Claude. But if Metis acts as the core intelligence powering the next generation of Alexa across hundreds of millions of living rooms, it instantly becomes one of the most accessible consumer AI interfaces on earth.

For the AI race, this represents Amazon finally defending its consumer flank. Enterprise customers can use Amazon Q on AWS, but general consumers have largely associated generative AI with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google.

The big risk is execution. Relying on RAG can fix freshness, but the underlying Olympus model still has to prove it can stand toe-to-toe with frontier competitors. If Olympus underdelivers, Metis risks landing as an awkward reminder of how long Amazon took to enter the arena.