Amazon is scrapping most of its in-house AI models and starting from scratch.
The company laid off some AGI team employees last week and shuttered the AGI Lab it founded in 2024.
Then it stopped major updates to most of its Nova flagship models. Nova Premier, Omni, the video model Reel, and the image model Canvas will only get existing customer support.
Nova is Amazon's family of AI models that was supposed to cover text, images, and video. That multi-pronged strategy is now effectively dead.
All the engineering and compute resources will go into a single new flagship foundation model. The project is being led by Pieter Abbeel, and it's expected to debut at AWS re:Invent this year. The new model might keep the Nova name — or get an entirely new brand.
Abbeel is a professor of AI and robotics at UC Berkeley, a leading figure in robot learning and reinforcement learning. He founded the robotics AI company Covariant, and Amazon poached its core team in 2024 while also licensing its model technology.
The students he mentored have gone on to found OpenAI, Perplexity, Physical Intelligence, Ideogram, Skild AI, and more. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman and Perplexity co-founder Aravind Srinivas were both his students.