Amazon Puts Its Nova AI Models on Ice After They Flop
Amazon Is Gutting Its AI Division After Sustained Failure
Bloomberg reports that Amazon is scaling back most of its in-house Nova AI models—text, image, and video—placing them in a bare-minimum "keep the lights on" state after the large language models failed to gain traction. Resources are being redirected to a single frontier-model effort led by Pieter Abbeel, whose robotics startup Covariant Amazon acquired in 2024. The shift follows the closure of an 80-person AGI research office in San Francisco.
Unlike its competitors in the tech megacorp scene, Amazon's standout AI model — organized under the name "Nova" — is about the farthest thing from a household name.
- atleastoptimal
Either you are getting the smartest engineers, or offer the most freedom to pursue interesting goals that aren't on the frontier. Amazon has neither so they naturally aren't going anywhere in that domain.
- futuraperdita
Anyone that's been in the Amazon offices in the last few years is not likely to have witnessed a culture that fosters lab-grade innovation.
- Foxhuls
This article was published on July 29th. I’m not saying it may not still be interesting or whatever but I thought that was worth pointing out.
- kazinator
I just played with Nova after seeing this submission. I gave it some real problems for which I used Gemini. It markedly "dumb" in comparison, losing sight of facts that I presented in the first prompt of the chat, and other subsequently introduced, and its responses contain repetitions of the same point-form advice. It's like GPT-3 level or something.
- etothet
Amazon Nova is their model? I worked for a company that was being pushed into trying to use AWS's "Nova Act" [0], which I guess was their python-based wrapper to do things in Playwright. I didn't think it used Nova the model under the hood though, or maybe it did. Either way, Nova Act was horrible in terms of performance - it was so...damn...slooooow. Much easier to just use Playwright.