Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announces departure of AI exec Rohit Prasad in leadership shake-up

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy dropped an AI bombshell on employees today, announcing that Rohit Prasad—who has led Amazon’s so-called AGI (artificial general intelligence) team since 2023, overseeing the development of the company’s Nova models—will depart at the end of the year.

Prasad previously served as the head scientist behind Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, a role he held from the product’s earliest days. When he was appointed to lead the new ambitious AGI effort after ChatGPT launched in November 2022, as part of a scramble to develop a competitive LLM that could help reinvigorate the Alexa voice assistant, it was led almost entirely by ex–Alexa executives. 

In a blog post, Jassy announced 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 leadersh...