Amazon has fallen behind the leading developers of large language models, but the company's AI chief believes it can close the gap soon, according to CNBC.
The sticking point is Amazon's latest model. CNBC reports that Amazon's Nova2 model trails the most recent releases from OpenAI and Anthropic, the two companies widely seen as setting the pace in advanced AI.
Despite that gap, Amazon's AI chief told CNBC there is a path for the company to catch up within the "coming year." The framing is notable: rather than conceding the lead, Amazon is signaling confidence that it can pull even with rivals on a relatively short timeline.
The context matters because Amazon is one of the largest technology companies in the world, with enormous reach through its cloud business and consumer products. Falling behind smaller, AI-focused firms like OpenAI and Anthropic on the core technology — the underlying models that power chatbots and other tools — is a meaningful competitive concern for a company of its scale.
The sources here are limited, and details on exactly how Amazon intends to close the gap, or what benchmarks define "behind," are not specified beyond the comparison to OpenAI's and Anthropic's latest models.
Why it matters: how quickly Amazon can match the frontier model leaders will help determine whether the AI race remains a contest among a handful of specialized labs or expands to include the biggest names in tech.