Amazon's Rohit Prasad to exit as Head of Artificial General Intelligence

Amazon’s Head of Artificial General Intelligence, Rohit Prasad, will leave the brand at the end of the year, as it restructures its AI and advanced technology teams.

Prasad’s departure comes as Amazon reorganises how it oversees large AI models, custom chips and emerging technologies. It said Peter DeSantis, a longtime Amazon executive, will lead a new organisation that brings together its most advanced AI models, silicon development and quantum computing.

Announcing DeSantis’ appointment, Andy Jassy, President and CEO, Amazon, said, “I cannot think of a better leader for this organization than Peter. Peter has been at Amazon for over 27 years and led some of the most transformative technologies in computing history. Peter was the leader of Amazon EC2 when we launched this revolutionary service in 2006, and built out that excellent team over many years.”

In his new role, DeSantis will oversee teams working on Amazon’s Nova AI models, its AGI group, and chip programs such as Graviton and Trainium. He will report directly to senior leadership.

As part of the changes, Pieter Abbeel will lead the brand’s frontier model research team within the AGI organisation. Abbeel is an AI researcher and co-founder of robotics company Covariant. It said he will also continue working with its robotics team.

The brand said other AWS leaders will continue in their current roles, with some added responsibilities. Further details on the new AWS structure will be shared separately.

The brand also confirmed that Prasad, who joined the company in 2013, decided to leave at the end of the year. He played a key role in the development of Alexa and later led the creation of Amazon Nova and the brand’s AGI efforts.

It said the organisational changes are intended to bring closer alignment across its AI models, chips and cloud infrastructure as it expands its use of advanced AI technologies.