Story perspectives

Amazon Phases Out Nova Models, Shifts to Frontier AI

7/28/2026

Summary

Story summary

Amazon is winding down Nova models and focusing on a frontier-model effort.
Nova Premier, Omni, Reel video-generation and Canvas image-generation models are now in “KTLO” mode and deprecated.
Peter DeSantis took AGI oversight in December 2025 after Rohit Prasad left, closing the 2024 AGI Lab.
Frontier Model Research led by Pieter Abbeel is building a flagship model for re:Invent in fall 2026.
Amazon will keep supporting Nova 2 Sonic, Nova 2 Lite, Nova Forge and Nova Act with migration paths.

History

Historical Context

OpenAI launched the 175-billion-parameter GPT-3 model in July 2020, a leap from GPT-2’s 1.5 billion parameters that sparked a wave of commercial AI projects. The rapid uptake seen in AI-Dungeon, which grew to 1.5 million users by June 2020, illustrates the talent and infrastructure race now prompting leading cloud providers to restructure frontier-model efforts.

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Story summary

Amazon is winding down Nova models and focusing on a frontier-model effort.
Nova Premier, Omni, Reel video-generation and Canvas image-generation models are now in “KTLO” mode and deprecated.
Peter DeSantis took AGI oversight in December 2025 after Rohit Prasad left, closing the 2024 AGI Lab.
Frontier Model Research led by Pieter Abbeel is building a flagship model for re:Invent in fall 2026.
Amazon will keep supporting Nova 2 Sonic, Nova 2 Lite, Nova Forge and Nova Act with migration paths.

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