Amazon says AI chief Rohit Prasad is leaving, Peter DeSantis

Amazon says AI chief Rohit Prasad is leaving, Peter DeSantis to lead AGI group

Rohit Prasad, a topAmazonexecutive overseeing its artificial general intelligence unit, is leaving at the end of this year, the companyconfirmedWednesday.

As part of the move, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a blog post that the company is reorganizing the AGI unit under a more expansive division that will also include its silicon development and quantum computing teams. The new division will be led by Peter DeSantis, a 27-year veteran of Amazon who currently serves as a senior vice president in its cloud unit.

Jassy said the company is reorganizing its AI teams as it believes it has reached an inflection point with the technologies.

Amazon has been trying to beat the perception held by some industry watchers that its falling behind rivals in developing AI products. The company released its own foundation models, calledNova, as it races to compete with OpenAI,Googleand Anthropic. It also makes its own line ofTrainiumcustom AI chips that compete with Nvidia.

With the foundation thats been built, the traction were seeing, and Peters leadership bringing unified focus to these technologies, were well-positioned to lead and deliver meaningful capabilities for our customers, Jassy wrote. Im excited about what this team will build and how these foundational technologies will help shape Amazons future.

DeSantis will report directly to Jassy, he noted. The company is also tapping Pieter Abbeel, who joined Amazon in 2024 after it acquired robotics startupCovariant, to lead Amazons frontier model research team within the AGI group.

DeSantis joined Amazon in 1998, starting in the early days of Amazon Web Services as a general manager, and working his way up to become an SVP in 2016. For the past four years, hes led the AWS computing product teams, which include compute, storage, database, security and custom chip development, according to his LinkedIn page.

Prasad, who joined Amazon in 2013, previously served as a head scientist for Alexa before he was tapped in 2023 to steer the companys development of AGI.

Jassy said in the memo that Prasad has been missionary, passionate, and selfless, and Im grateful for his leadership, his technical vision, and everything hes built here.