Amazon overhauls its AI strategy, winding down most flagship models

businessinsider.com

6 pointsthm2 comments

Fired their pre-training team, shutting down Nova, shutting down the Adept Acqui-hire but still building another Foundation model

>According to the people familiar with the matter, resources have increasingly moved away from the existing Nova models and toward a new frontier-model effort led by researcher Pieter Abbeel, who came to Amazon through the acquisition of AI robotics startup Covariant. Known internally as Frontier Model Research, or FMR, the initiative has become a top priority this year.

Amazon (or at least AWS as I knew it) did this a lot. Multiple redundant efforts accumulate and silo under different leaders. Eventually a VP picks a winner and everyone else re-orgs or leaves.

Building a commercially viable foundational model business is one of the hardest things a company can do right now. Amazon's bread and butter was, is, and will continue to be building out the hyper-scalers. Amazon is actually well diversified already. They have a juicy stake in Anthropic over multiple rounds of investment since 2024.

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