[News] Amazon to Restructure AI Teams, Led by Veteran AWS Leadership

As per media reports on December 18, Amazon has announced a restructuring of its artificial intelligence (AI)–related project teams and the creation of a new business unit to be led by a senior executive from its cloud computing arm.

In an internal memo to employees on Wednesday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that Peter DeSantis will head the newly formed team.

DeSantis joined Amazon in 1998 and served as a general manager during the early days of Amazon Web Services (AWS). He was promoted to senior vice president in 2016. According to his LinkedIn profile, over the past four years he has led AWS’s compute product organization, overseeing businesses spanning compute, memory, database, networking, security, and custom chip development.

The new team will combine Amazon’s Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) team — responsible for the company’s Nova-branded AI models and the “digital brain” behind the Alexa voice assistant — with Amazon’s in-house chip development division and its quantum computing research teams.

(Photo credit: AWS)