Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) confirmed Wednesday that it’s cutting jobs within its artificial general intelligence organization, the group behind its Nova foundation models, without disclosing how many roles are affected.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company is “sharpening our focus on the initiatives that matter most for customers” as part of the decision. Affected US workers will receive 90 days of pay and benefits, outplacement support, transitional healthcare coverage, and eligibility for severance.
The AGI organization is best known for its Nova models, but it’s a broader unit that also covers chip design and quantum computing work. The “AGI” label is something of a misnomer, since the group’s output has centered on today’s frontier models rather than machines that could rival or surpass human thinking, which is what artificial general intelligence actually refers to.
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Its leadership has already changed twice in the past year: the company replaced group head Rohit Prasad with senior vice president Peter DeSantis in December, folding the unit into DeSantis’s broader engineering organization, and AGI Lab head David Luan left in February.
The cuts extend a pattern of reductions at Amazon that began with roughly 16,000 corporate job losses in January, part of a broader wave that has eliminated close to 30,000 positions since October. Amazon has continued trimming smaller teams throughout the year, including its robotics division in March and Selling Partner Services in May.
Related: Amazon Cuts More Jobs in Seller Services as Tech Layoffs Surpass 45,000
Amazon has kept investing in AI even as it narrows the AGI group’s mandate, most recently committing $1 billion to place AWS engineers directly inside client companies building their own AI systems. The company maintains that building large models remains central to its strategy, even as this round of cuts pushes its AI teams toward work with a more direct line to paying customers.
Related: CEOs Drop the Euphemisms: AI Is Now Openly Cited as the Reason for Mass Tech Layoffs
