Amazon shelves most of its Nova models to bet everything on one frontier model
Amazon is winding down its flagship Nova models — Premier, Omni, Reel and Canvas — leaving them running only for existing customers, according to multiple reports this week. Engineers are being moved into Frontier Model Research, a new group led by UC Berkeley robotics professor Pieter Abbeel, whose job is to build a single competitive foundation model, expected around the re:Invent conference this autumn. The cheaper Nova 2 Lite and Nova 2 Sonic models and the Nova Forge and Nova Act services stay.
Why it mattersThe world's biggest cloud provider is conceding that its sprawling in-house model family failed to land a punch against OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. With AWS committed to record AI capital spending, Amazon is now trying the strategy everyone else started with: one team, one frontier model — and it has until autumn to show results.
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