Amazon is closing its San Francisco AGI website as a part of the layoffs it made this week in its synthetic normal intelligence group, however mentioned its frontier mannequin analysis lab will proceed.
An organization spokesperson confirmed the information of the positioning closure, which was first reported by The Data. Amazon’s frontier mannequin analysis work will keep it up underneath Pieter Abbeel, a UC Berkeley professor who joined Amazon in 2024 when the corporate licensed the expertise and employed the staff from Covariant, the robotics startup he co-founded.
The AGI Lab was based in December 2024 and initially constructed round a number of dozen staff Amazon introduced in from the startup Adept, together with its co-founder and CEO David Luan.
The staff grew to about 80 individuals at its peak, in response to The Data, however greater than a dozen of the Adept hires have since left, Luan amongst them. Earlier this week, Amazon confirmed it was reducing an unspecified variety of jobs throughout the broader AGI group.
Impacted staff could have the possibility to discover different roles at Amazon, the spokesperson mentioned, and the corporate is supporting them by way of that course of.
Nova Act, the browser-agent mannequin and repair that got here out of the group, stays obtainable on AWS and in use by clients. Extra broadly, AWS has continued to construct out its agentic AI lineup, together with Bedrock AgentCore and functions like Kiro, Fast, Continuum and Rework.
The strikes come as Amazon invests closely in serving to clients deploy AI, together with a $1 billion AWS effort to embed engineers with companies constructing AI brokers. The initiative displays an expanded business focus towards placing brokers and fashions to higher use for patrons.
