Amazon is still hard at work in its efforts to realize an AI-powered Alexa digital assistant. As the Financial Times reports, the tech giant still has to sort out “several technical hurdles” before rolling out the long-awaited feature. One of them, according to Amazon AI team lead Rohit Prasad, is solving the pesky issue of “hallucinations” — an industry term denoting the non-factual hallucinations that large language models often spit out, to the chagrin of many companies attempting to commercialize the tech. “Hallucinations have to be close to zero,” Prasad told the FT. The issue? That’s far easier said than done. Despite billions of dollars of investment and the construction of massive data centers to power increasingly complex AI models, even the most advanced chatbots still have a strong tendency to “hallucinate” false claims. Some experts have long argued that the issue might be intrinsic to the tech itself. In other words, hallucinations may always be a part of the equation — an unfortunate reality that tech companies are unlikely to admit, especially in the face of all of generative AI’s buzz right now. “They’re really just sort of designed to predict the next word,” Anthropic cofounder and president Daniela Amodei told the Associated Press back in 2023. “And so there will be some rate at which the model does that inaccurately.” Meanwhile, tech companies that have invested astronomical sums in the tech’s development are attempting to sweep the topic of hallucinations under the rug, insisting that it’s only a matter…Amazon Says All It Needs to Do Before Releasing an AI-Powered Alexa Is to Solve the Giant Engineering Problem That Nobody Else on Earth Has Been Able to Solve