Amazon Pulls Back From Broad Nova AI Push to Prioritize Frontier Models

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Amazon's public AI identity is being pared down rather than expanded. Bloomberg-sourced reporting says the company is limiting internal support for most Nova systems and aligning teams around what it calls "highest priority" goals.

Recognition gap drives the retrenchment

OpenAI is commonly linked to ChatGPT, Anthropic to Claude, and Google to Gemini. Amazon's Nova group is not viewed in the same way, and the ecommerce giant is reported to be reducing that model portfolio's scope.

Which Nova systems are affected

• Text-based Nova models are put on hold.
• Video-generation Nova models lose active investment.
• Image-generation Nova models are reduced to minimal support.
• All affected models are described as being in a "keep the lights on," state.

Resource shift to one frontier-model effort

Staff and computing capacity are being redirected toward a frontier-model effort led by Pieter Abbeel, director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab. Amazon acquired his robotics company, Covariant, in 2024, and Abbeel's earlier team had been developing AI models for robots, matching Amazon's automation ambitions.

Closure at a San Francisco AI office

The reporting of this strategic change arrives a week after Amazon closed an important AI office in San Francisco. The site had an 80-person group focused on artificial general intelligence research, the proposed next stage where systems reach human-level intelligence and reasoning.

Exit from the hype cycle?

With doubts about large language model ROI and even more uncertainty around AGI, Amazon may be reducing its exposure to AI hype before the costs become harder to reverse.