Ashwin Ram, the former senior manager and lead for Amazon’s Alexa artificial intelligence (AI) unit, has left the American e-commerce giant to work for Google.
Ram, according to his post on LinkedIn, says he is now the technical director of AI for Google Cloud. “Google arguably has the best AI on the planet,” said Ram in his post. “My role will be to help make that AI even better and broadly available to everyone.”
The executive spent the past two years at Amazon. While there, he created the Alexa Prize.
Alexa Prize is a competition where Amazon challenges teams from several universities around the world to create socialbots that can converse “coherently and engagingly with humans…”
The company will award a $500,000 USD prize in November for the team with the best socialbot. It will also give a $1 million research grant to the university if their socialbot can converse coherently and engagingly with humans for 20 minutes with a 4.0 or higher rating.
Source: LinkedIn Via: Quartz Media
