Illustration by 731; Photo: Amazon
Alexa’s New AI Brain Is Stuck in the Lab
Amazon is eager to take on ChatGPT, but technical challenges have forced the company to repeatedly postpone the updated voice assistant’s debut.
Andy Jassy kept prodding Alexa with sports questions. It was summer 2023, and Amazon.com Inc.’s chief executive officer wanted to see if a prototype of the voice assistant, upgraded with artificial intelligence, was good enough to compete with ChatGPT, the AI chatbot from OpenAI that had wowed the world around eight months earlier with its conversational wizardry.
So Jassy, a devoted New York Giants football fan and investor in the Seattle Kraken hockey team, interrogated Alexa like an ESPN reporter at a playoff press conference—asking the assistant to drill down into individual player performance, league standings, team history and so on. Alexa survived the interview, though its answers were nowhere near perfect: When Jassy asked for a recent game outcome, Alexa simply made up the score.