Amazon is secretly working on a 'ChatGPT killer' bot that will act as your own personal 'AI agent'

Tech companies are scrambling to keep up in the race for AI supremacy, and it seems Amazon is no different.
The tech giant is secretly working on an AI chatbot which it hopes will prise users away from ChatGPT, according to a report.
Amazon's 'ChatGPT killer' – named 'Metis' after the Greek god of wisdom – will likely be launched at its autumn product event, expected to occur in September.
When prompted, Metis will return up-to-date text information in a 'conversational manner, as well as images.
But its abilities will go even further by performing 'complex' tasks such as turning on your lights and booking a flight for you – acting as an 'AI agent'.
The report was published by Business Insider, who cites an internal document and people familiar with the project at Amazon.
Amazon is working on a new AI service to compete with ChatGPT, it says.
The tentative launch date for Metis is September, right around the time when Amazon hosts a big Alexa event.
Like ChatGPT, Metis will be accessible through a web browser, the report claims, but it may also be available through an Amazon app in due course.
Also like ChatGPT, Metis will boast retrieval-augmented generation– the ability to retrieve information from beyond the original data that its been trained with.
But Amazon wants to make it a smarter and more capable helper than ChatGPT, creating an AI agent thats not just focused on returning facts.
Its already been revealed that Amazon is planning on fitting its smart assistant Alexa with more powerful AI capabilities.
At the moment its unclear whether this is a separate project at Amazon or if Metis will somehow be integrated with Alexa.
MailOnline has contacted Amazon for comment, but the tech giant is not expected to make any major public revelations before its September event.
Back in April, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy admitted that the company has been working on its own LLMs or large language models – AIs that can comprehend and generate human language text.
Let’s just say that LLMs and Generative AI are going to be a big deal for customers, our shareholders, and Amazon, he said.
Business Insider says that Amazon is trying to catch up in the AI race, particularly in consumer AI assistants which have been a missing spot for the tech giant.
Its big rivals in tech already have their own AI chatbots, including Google (Gemini) and X (Grok) while Microsoft and Apple now have integrations with ChatGPT.
Amazon has already introduced a chatbot called Q, although it helps with business queries and is not designed for general use for news, weather and facts.
Among its skills are summarising meetings, explaining programming code and locating information from hundreds of company documents.