Nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who isn’t familiar with the AI stalwart and its flagship models. OpenAI has ChatGPT, Anthropic has Claude, and Google has Gemini. But what does Amazon have?
There aren’t that many. Unlike its competitors at the tech giant, Amazon’s standout AI model, organized under the name “Nova,” is the furthest thing from a household name. And this situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. That’s because the e-commerce giant is now eliminating its in-house AI lab. bloomberg I will report it.
Amazon is scaling back the ambitions of most of its Nova AI models and reorganizing its AI development team as part of an effort to focus on “top-priority” goals after a large, power-hungry language model turned out to be broken, the outlet said.
Therefore, the company has put most of its AI models on ice, an Amazon insider said. bloomberg. This includes text-based Nova models, video and image generation models. All of these are in a “lights on” state. That is, it is still technically supported, but receives only the minimum resources necessary to maintain it.
Instead, the workforce and computing power is being redirected to a unique “frontier model effort” led by Pieter Abbeel, director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab at Covariant, a robotics company acquired by Amazon in 2024. At the time Abbeel joined the tech giant, Covariant’s founders were working on AI models for robots, which aligns very well with Amazon’s efforts to automate everything possible.
News of Amazon’s change in strategic focus comes a week after the company closed one of its major AI offices in San Francisco. The office is home to 80 people who specialize in researching artificial general intelligence, the next level of AI development where technology gains human-level intelligence and reasoning skills.
With pressing questions swirling around whether LLM, let alone AGI, can deliver a return on investment, Amazon may be trying to break out of the AI hype cycle while it still can.
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