Amazon taps Peter DeSantis to lead AI and silicon
The online retailer is consolidating its largest AI models, custom chips and quantum work under a single organisation.
Amazon has appointed Peter DeSantis to head a new organisation that will bring together its most expansive AI models, custom silicon development and quantum computing.
The company said in a statement the change groups Amazon's Nova models, the team called 'AGI', Graviton, Trainium, Nitro and related quantum work under one leader to optimise across models, chips and cloud infrastructure.
"I’ve asked Peter DeSantis to lead a new organization that drives our most expansive AI models (e.g. Nova—and the team we’ve called 'AGI'), silicon development (e.g. Graviton, Trainium, Nitro), and quantum computing," Andy Jassy wrote. Peter has been at Amazon for over 27 years and led Amazon EC2 at its 2006 launch. He led the acquisition of Annapurna Labs in 2015, ran AWS Infrastructure from 2016 overseeing data centres, networking, hardware and supply chain, and in 2021 moved to lead AWS Utility Computing services.
The company said Pieter Abbeel will lead the frontier model research team in AGI and will continue work with the Robotics team. The firm added that Matt Garman will outline the new AWS structure in a follow-up note.
The company said Rohit Prasad will leave Amazon at the end of this year after joining in 2013 and helping build Alexa. It said Prasad led creation of Amazon Nova and the AGI organisation, building twelve foundation models now used by tens of thousands of companies. "I'm excited about what this team will build and how these foundational technologies will help shape Amazon's future," Andy Jassy wrote.
The Recap
- Peter DeSantis will lead Amazon's AI, silicon and quantum organisation.
- Amazon infrastructure stretches across 38 geographic regions and 120 Availability Zones.
- Rohit Prasad will leave Amazon at the end of this year.
