Link: Amazon is reportedly way behind on its new Alexa

Many of the former employees interviewed by Fortune said they left in part because they believed the new Alexa would never be ready or would already be overtaken by competitors if and when it did launch. Its biggest weakness, compared to companies like OpenAI and its headline-grabbing ChatGPT, is that it has to “navigate an existing tech stack and defend an existing feature set,” according to Fortune. Basically, the old Alexa is getting in the way of the new Alexa. Fortune’s sources say Amazon has not yet figured out how to combine what Alexa can do now with the capabilities it touted for the new Alexa last fall — a better, smarter, more conversational assistant. One employee told Fortune that the message at the company after the demo event was that “we need to basically burn the bridge with the old Alexa AI model and pivot to only working on the new one.” The message at Amazon was that “we need to basically burn the bridge with the old Alexa AI model and pivot to only working on the new one.” According to Fortune, Amazon has grappled with getting its Alexa LLM to consistently and effectively make API calls, which is how the current Alexa interacts with your other stuff, such as third-party smart home devices and music services. It’s also struggled to train the LLM to understand natural language, as while it has millions of devices in the wild, its customers have trained themselves to speak in “Alexa language” and don’t interact conversationally with the device. #

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