Amazon Artificial General Intelligence VP Departs: Report

Karthik Ramakrishnan was with Amazon for about 14 years and worked on Alexa products during his tenure.

An executive working on artificial general intelligence at Amazon has reportedly left the technology giant.

Karthik Ramakrishnan, vice president of AGI–a term usually applied to AI that can understand, learn and apply intelligence to a human-like degree–has been with Amazon for about 14 years, according to his LinkedIn account. Reuters reported Friday that the VP was leaving the same day.

While the largest technology companies are always jockeying for top talent, the battle has reached a new level in the era of artificial intelligence. Facebook parent Meta offered $200 million over several years to hire Ruoming Pang, who ran Apple’s AI models team, according to a Bloomberg article from July.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during an appearance on his brother’s podcast this summer that Meta has tried to hire away a variety of his employees with signing bonuses as high as $100 million.

[RELATED: AWS Hires Two Vice Presidents To Drive Agentic AI For Agentcore And Kiro]

Amazon VP Leaves

CRN has reached out to Amazon and Ramakrishnan for comment.

Amazon has seen engineers in charge of solutions like Amazon Q, OpenSearch Serverless and Amazon Web Services Glue leave the company in recent months, as well as an executive in charge of AWS’ Generative AI group and an executive in charge of global data centers.

But the vendor–which has about 130,000 partners worldwide–has also seen some major executive pick-ups as well, including new VPs to help drive the $124 billion company’s agentic AI business, specifically around AgentCore and AWS Kiro.

It was not immediately clear what Ramakrishnan will do next. He joined Amazon in 2012 and helped develop virtual assistant Alexa and the Echo suite of products, according to his LinkedIn profile.

He led the creation of Alexa’s speech recognition, language understanding and other parts of the device’s software stack.

His resume includes about three years with Microsoft, leaving in 2010 as a senior platform engineer. He joined Microsoft through the acquisition of Tellme Networks in 2007.