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Nov 6 (Reuters) – Amazon (AMZN.O) is investing millions in training an ambitious large language model (LLMs), hoping it could rival top models from OpenAI and Alphabet (GOOGL.O), two people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The model, codenamed as “Olympus”, has 2 trillion parameters, the people said, which could make it one of the largest models being trained. OpenAI’s GPT-4 models, one of the best models available, is reported to have one trillion parameters.

The people spoke on condition of anonymity because the details of the project were not yet public.

Amazon declined to comment. The Information reported on the project name on Tuesday.

The team is spearheaded by Rohit Prasad, former head of Alexa, who now reports directly to CEO Andy Jassy. As head scientist of general artificial intelligence (AI) at Amazon, Prasad brought researchers who had been working on Alexa AI and the Amazon science team together to work on training models.

Amazon has already trained smaller models such as Titan. It has also partnered with AI model startups such as Anthropic and AI21 Labs, offering them to Amazon Web Services (AWS) users.

Amazon believes having homegrown models could make its offerings more attractive on AWS, where enterprise clients want to access top-performing models, sources said.

LLMs are the underlying technology for AI tools that learn from huge datasets to generate human-like responses.

Training bigger AI models is more expensive given the amount of computing power required. In an earnings call in April, Amazon executives said the company would increase investment in LLMs and generative AI while cutting back on fulfillment and transportation in its retail business.

Reporting by Krystal Hu in San Francisco. Editing by Gerry Doyle

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Krystal reports on venture capital and startups for Reuters. She covers Silicon Valley and beyond through the lens of money and characters, with a focus on growth-stage startups, tech investments and AI. She has previously covered M&A for Reuters, breaking stories on Trump’s SPAC and Elon Musk’s Twitter financing. Previously, she reported on Amazon for Yahoo Finance, and her investigation of the company’s retail practice was cited by lawmakers in Congress. Krystal started a career in journalism by writing about tech and politics in China. She has a master’s degree from New York University, and enjoys a scoop of Matcha ice cream as much as getting a scoop at work.

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