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.
WAIT, you mean not every single LLM company is going to win the LLM race? That in the end it’ll be somewhere between 0 and 3 companies who make big money with a handful of niche players? Who would have thought?
Many LLM labs are shockingly dysfunctional.
Amazon and the useless Nova series is a great example, but Microsoft has its own too. AMD as well.
Europe has a ton of them, labs barely replicating obsolete Llama2 training routines in 2026, but somehow getting tons of taxpayer dollars? Saudi labs doing basically nothing.
I mean… I could follow an off-the-shelf Nvidia Nemotron recipe and do better. Or more sanely, just start with that as a base. And that’s sad; apparently these highly paid labs don’t even follow the space enough to know to do that? What on Earth are they even doing internally?
Have you seen how these tech companies treat their workers? Too many in the field are extremely burnt out to point that they can’t function anywhere near the level required for the technological breakthroughs that the execs are demanding. They want to hire entry to mid-level data scientists for the low pay and then expect them to output the quality of work of a senior data scientist with 10+ years of experience. They’re being set up to fail.
What is the point of creating a new frontier model? Even if you create something that is actually better than the rest (which is hard), it probably won’t be that much better people are going to switch by themselves. Which means you need to heavily discount the price in order to get people to use it at all. This means not only do you need to front the investment to develop the model, and of course all of the marketing costs, but then also running at a loss for at least the first while. And let’s say somehow people go along with you increasing prices once you get people on the platform (which is a big ask) to the point you get a modest profit, the amount of upfront investment would take years and years to make back.
Meanwhile everyone and their uncle is also working on their new frontier model and will be very tempting for your customers to switch to. Especially once you start increasing prices to get profitable. Users have shown very little to no brand loyalty and just use whatever. There’s so many options available and all offer about the same in terms of UI and functionality.
Google is combining their AI stuff with their products, which is good for adoption, but people aren’t willing to pay much for that. Microsoft was really well positioned to bundle it with their stuff, but somehow not only got in hot water with governments over them forcing users to use their AI stuff, but also didn’t get users to use or pay for their AI stuff at all. The same story for others, getting adoption only works with very low prices or even free stuff. Even then it’s hard and people switch quickly once prices go up. Companies are now also much more aware of the price of these things and the lack of ROI, so I would expect spending to go down in the future.
There isn’t much of a point in creating a frontier model, which is why you’re seeing a lot of Silicon Valley pivot if they can.
Google seemed to be comfortable in not being at the bleeding edge, just far enough not to topple its search engine. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google’s AI is cheaper to run than other models.
Meta doesn’t have anything other than social media and can’t seem to make the next big thing.
Microsoft is getting railed because of the collapse in gaming and a major market going towards digital sovereignty. It also doesn’t help that its rollout of Windows 11 was so bad there is now a Linux consumer threat. The problem is that there isn’t anything else for them to sell except AI.
lol
Lmao, even
Step 1: Spend tons of money on AI Step 2: Fire 10-20% of total tech workforce Step 3: ? Step 4: Profit (post positive earnings) Step 5: Fire even more employees because your AI solution is failing anyway
Amazon both fired a ton and had a ton of senior people leave, they burned the candle from both ends directly and indirectly and the effects are starting to amplify.
