Who Is Rohit Prasad? Alexa Mastermind To Exit Amazon After 13 Years Amid AI Shake-Up
His departure marks a major overhaul of senior management at Amazon.
Rohit Prasad, senior vice president and head scientist of artificial general intelligence at Amazon, is set to exit the company at the end of the year.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy informed employees of the decision on Wednesday. Prasad has led Amazon's AGI team since 2023 and oversaw the development of the company’s Nova AI models.
Prasad earlier served as the chief scientist behind Alexa and was closely associated with the voice assistant from its early days. His departure marks a major overhaul of senior management at Amazon.
In a blog post, Jassy said longtime AWS executive Peter DeSantis will head a new organisation overseeing AI model development. He will also look after custom chips such as Graviton and Trainium and Amazon’s quantum computing initiatives.
Who Is Rohit Prasad?
After the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, Amazon created a dedicated AGI group to build competitive large language models and revive Alexa. Prasad was placed in charge of this effort, with the team largely made up of former Alexa leaders.
In his role, Prasad led a multidisciplinary team focused on advancing generalisable AI, according to his LinkedIn profile. He has been associated with Amazon for nearly 13 years, starting as director of machine learning for Alexa in 2013. In 2021, he was appointed vice president and head scientist of Alexa AI. In July 2023, he was promoted to senior vice president and head scientist of AGI.
Before joining Amazon, he worked at Raytheon BBN Technologies for nearly 14 years. He served as deputy manager and senior director of the speech and multimedia business unit before exiting the company.
He holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering from the Illinois Institute of Technology, earned between 1997 and 1999. He later completed the Greater Boston Executive Program at MIT Sloan School of Management in 2008.
According to a report by Fortune, Prasad’s exit is surprising, especially since he recently appeared at Amazon's 'Re:Invent' conference discussing the Nova models. However, reports over the past two years have highlighted struggles within Amazon’s Alexa and AGI efforts. The ongoing layoffs have added to the speculation that Amazon is lagging in the AI race, particularly in cloud services, Fortune report added.
