Amazon.com is revamping its AI strategy, winding down many of its in-house models and sharpening focus on a new frontier-model effort, Business Insider reported on Tuesday citing people familiar with the matter. The company has begun deprecating most of its flagship Nova AI models, including the high-end Premier and Omni models, the Reel video-generation model and the Canvas image-generation model.
Instead, Amazon is increasingly moving resources toward a frontier-model development led by researcher Pieter Abbeel, with frontier research becoming a top priority this year. The new flagship model is expected to debut at Amazon's re:Invent annual conference later this year. 'As with any AI portfolio, we continually evolve our model lineup based on what customers need,' an Amazon spokesperson told Reuters. 'We're continuing to invest in and support the Nova models our customers rely on today... We're also investing in the next generation of frontier model research.'
The move comes days after Amazon trimmed jobs in its artificial general intelligence (AGI) group as the company sharpens focus on 'the initiatives that matter most for customers.' Amazon has struggled to generate buzz around its Nova models the way rivals OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have, instead doubling down on providing crucial AI infrastructure for enterprises. The company is not abandoning Nova altogether, however — the new frontier model could emerge under the Nova brand, Business Insider reported, and models such as Nova 2 Lite, Nova 2 Sonic and Nova Forge, a service letting customers build their own models, remain part of the lineup.
Amazon's AGI efforts have undergone several changes since they took shape in 2023: the company consolidated its AGI work under cloud veteran Peter DeSantis in December and has seen top AGI executives depart over the past year. The reset lands in the same week Amazon posted record Q2 earnings with AWS growth above 30% year over year — a reminder that even with Amazon's enormous resources and roughly $200 billion in planned 2026 capital spending, building competitive frontier models remains brutally difficult.
