Amazon is sharply reducing its in-house AI program after its Nova models failed to gain prominence and large language models proved costly to develop. The company has reportedly put most Nova text, image, and video systems into “keep the lights on” mode: they remain supported, but receive only the resources needed to maintain them. Amazon is also reorganizing its AI teams and narrowing its ambitions to a smaller set of priorities, rather than continuing broad development across multiple model types.
The main focus will shift to a single frontier-model effort led by Pieter Abbeel, a robotics researcher who joined Amazon after the company acquired his startup, Covariant, in 2024. That emphasis fits Amazon’s interest in using AI to automate work and operate robots. The shift follows the closure of an 80-person San Francisco office focused on artificial general intelligence research. Together, these moves suggest Amazon is redirecting staff and computing capacity away from general-purpose generative AI toward robotics, as doubts grow about whether expensive language models can deliver adequate returns - or lead to human-level intelligence.
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