OpenAI has ChatGPT, Anthropic has Claude, Google has Gemini. But what does Amazon have?
Not a whole lot, it turns out. Unlike its competitors in the tech megacorp scene, Amazon’s standout AI model — organized under the name “Nova” — is about the farthest thing from a household name. And that’s not likely to change anytime soon, because the ecommerce giant is now gutting its in-house AI labs, Bloomberg reports.
Per the outlet, Amazon is scaling back the ambitions of most of its Nova AI models and reorganizing its AI development teams as part of an effort to narrow its focus on “highest priority” goals, after its power-hungry large language models turned out to be a bust.
Accordingly, the company has put most of its AI models on ice, Amazon insiders told Bloomberg. This includes its text-based Nova models, as well as video- and image-generating models, all of which have been placed in a state of “keep the lights on,” meaning they’re technically still supported, but only receive the bare minimum resources needed to sustain them.
Instead, labor and computing power are being diverted toward a singular “frontier-model effort” led by Pieter Abbeel, director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab whose robotics company Covariant was hoovered up by Amazon in 2024. At the time Abbeel joined the tech giant, Covariant’s founders were working on AI models for robots, which lines up pretty well with Amazon’s push to automate everything it possibly can.
News of the shift in Amazon’s strategic focus comes a week after it closed one of its key AI offices in San Francisco, an 80-person site specializing in research on artificial general intelligence, the supposed next-level of AI development where the tech obtains human-level intelligence and reasoning skills.
Back in the 90s, I was working in the record business, on the sales & marketing side.
All these chains of massive big box record/video/book/electronics/computer stores started popping up across America - Best Buy, Circuit City, Media Play, Virgin, Borders, Barnes & Noble, etc. - as well as all the established chains like Recordtown, Camelot, etc. adding big box stores. Every city had at least one of EACH of these chains, if not 2 or 3. Every city, even smaller or mid-size cities, soon had 10 or more Big Box stores spread around, each with massive displays of inventory.
That meant every city had far more inventory than any market could possibly bear. I was in the Classical/Jazz division, and knew that even a “hit” classical record would only sell maybe 50 copies in a city, but now there were 1000 copies in all the stores in that city, and MOST of them would never sell, and would eventually get returned. But I got paid commission on sales, and my commission wasn’t clawed back if it got returned, so I did my job, and sold all that overstock inventory that the Big Boxes demanded, collected my commission, and bought a house.
I knew ALL the major players at the Big Box chains, and they were aware that the situation was unsustainable, but eventually they would run all the others out of business, primarily through predatory loss leader sale pricing, and be the last man standing. That was the strategy that they ALL had, without exception, and it worked. Before long, they all started to close stores.
Today, the only one left is Best Buy, and they don’t even carry music any more, after running every other music store out of business.
The point is, that same Last Man Standing scenario seems to be the strategy here, too. Lots of money will be wasted by companies who blink, and abandon their commitment, or are run out of business because the market simply can’t bear that much competition for limited interest in the product. At least people WANTED music, people are literally HOSTILE toward Data Center products.
Amazon already won their version of that contest. I can’t imagine how the people running it think, but maybe they wouldn’t want to play that game again when they can just wait and buy up all the losers at a small fraction of the current value.
And even the losers will end up with datacenter sized space all over kingdom come with access to massive amounts of electricity and water to begin the next phase of evil.