Amazon Revamps AI, Halts Nova Flagship Model Upgrades

Amazon is revamping its self-developed AI, laying off a number of employees from its AGI team and shutting down the AGI Lab established in 2024. Most of the Nova flagship models have been halted from significant upgrades, including Nova Premier, Omni, the video model Reel, and the image model Canvas, with only existing customer support being maintained. Nova is a family of AI models developed by Amazon, originally covering text, images, and video, but the multi-pronged strategy has essentially come to an end. Human resources and computing power will be concentrated on a new flagship foundational model, led by Pieter Abbeel, which is expected to be unveiled at AWS re:Invent. The new model may continue to be called Nova or could adopt an entirely new brand. Abbeel is a professor of AI and robotics at the University of California, Berkeley, and previously founded the robotics AI company Covariant. Amazon poached his core team in 2024 and obtained licensing for the model technology. His students have founded companies like OpenAI and Perplexity, with OpenAI co-founder John Schulman and Perplexity co-founder Aravind Srinivas both being his former students.