Amazon AI Overhaul: Most Nova Flagship Models Halted, OpenAI Co-Founder Mentor Takes Over New Model

According to monitoring by Beating, Amazon is revamping its in-house AI efforts. Last week, the company not only laid off a batch of AGI team employees but also shut down the AGI Lab established in 2024. Subsequently, most Nova flagship models have ceased major upgrades. Nova Premier, Omni, the video model Reel, and the image model Canvas will only retain existing customer support. Nova is Amazon's in-house AI model family, originally covering text, images, and video simultaneously. Now, this multi-pronged strategy has essentially come to an end. Resources in manpower and computational power will be concentrated on a new flagship foundational model. The project is led by Pieter Abbeel and is expected to debut at AWS re:Invent this year. The new model may continue to be called Nova or may adopt an entirely new brand name. Abbeel is a professor of AI and robotics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a leading scholar in the fields of robotic learning and reinforcement learning. He previously founded the robotics AI company Covariant, whose core team Amazon poached in 2024, along with acquiring model technology licenses. His students have also founded companies such as OpenAI, Perplexity, Physical Intelligence, Ideogram, and Skild AI. OpenAI co-founder John Schulman and Perplexity co-founder Aravind Srinivas were among his students. [Original Link]