Amazon’s ‘Olympus’ Model Faces Steep Odds; Nvidia Crushes Google in AI Chip Test

Amazon’s mostly male executives apparently aren’t among the large group of men who supposedly spend much of the day thinking about the ancient Roman Empire. Instead, the folks at Amazon Web Services have been more focused on Greek mythology—at least when it comes to the naming conventions of their AI models.

After its first batch of models, called Titan, got off to a rough start, Amazon is developing a new model, codenamed Olympus, we reported yesterday. Amazon hopes Olympus will help it catch up to OpenAI and Microsoft. 

I know there are tons of AI models to think about, but Olympus is worth paying attention to. For starters, it’s a clear sign that Amazon wants to control its own destiny in AI. While Amazon also sells LLMs from other model providers, such as Anthropic, investing money in developing another giant AI model shows that the company ultimately doesn’t want to rely on others for key technologies it offers to cloud customers. That’s probably smart, because who knows what Anthropic’s long-term thinking is, and the startup is also staying close to Google, a top AWS rival.