Amazon to Launch Metis AI Chatbot to Rival OpenAI's ChatGPT

Amazon is developing a new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot called Metis to compete with OpenAI's popular ChatGPT, according to sources familiar with the matter who revealed this to Business Insider.

The virtual assistant, code-named "Metis", is designed to provide text and image-based responses in a conversational manner similar to other AI bots like ChatGPT, CoPilot, Gemini and more. It will also be able to share links to back up its answers, suggest related questions, and generate images.

Metis is powered by Amazon's internally developed AI model, Olympus, which is said to be more powerful than the company's existing Titan model. Olympus and Metis both draw their names from Greek mythology—Metis was the goddess of wisdom in ancient Greece.

The sources tell Business Insider that Metis will use a retrieval-augmented generation technique to provide up-to-date information by going beyond the original data used to train Olympus. This allows it to share real-time data like stock prices. Metis is also expected to function as an "AI assistant" capable of automatically performing complex user tasks based on their inputs and existing data.

The launch of Metis comes as Amazon looks to catch up in the AI assistant space dominated by ChatGPT and offerings from Microsoft, Google, Apple and others. While no official launch date has been set, sources indicate Metis could debut during Amazon's annual Alexa event as early as September.