Amazon's AI Restart: Nova's Most Flagship Projects Halted, OpenAI Co-Founder Takes Over New Model

According to Dynamic Beating Monitor, Amazon is restructuring its in-house AI. Last week, not only did they lay off a group of AGI team members, but they also shut down the AGI Lab established in 2024.

Subsequently, most of the Nova flagship models have been halted for major upgrades. Nova Premier, Omni, the video model Reel, and the image model Canvas will only maintain existing customer support.

Nova is Amazon's proprietary AI model family, originally covering text, images, and videos simultaneously. Now, this multi-line parallel strategy is essentially ending.

Human resources and computing power will be focused on a new flagship base model. The project is led by Pieter Abbeel and is expected to debut this year at AWS re:Invent. The new model may continue to be called Nova or may adopt an entirely new brand.

Abbeel is a professor of AI and robotics at the University of California, Berkeley, and a top scholar in the fields of robotic learning and reinforcement learning. He previously founded the robot AI company Covariant, which Amazon poached the core team from in 2024 and obtained model technology licenses.

His mentees 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 both his students.