Amazon is retreating from the race to build the smartest AI. This week it closed its AGI Lab, a San Francisco team working on artificial general intelligence, The Information reported. The move was part of layoffs across Amazon’s AGI unit, Reuters first reported.
The lab was barely 18 months old.
Amazon set it up in December 2024 with several dozen staff. Its job was to make AI agents more useful to businesses. Now it is gone, and the people who built it are being let go. The full scale of the cuts is not yet clear.
Amazon frames this as focus, not surrender. “We’ve been building large AI models for several years, and it remains one of the most important things we’re working on,” a spokesperson said. The company is “sharpening our focus on the initiatives that matter most for customers”. That focus, it added, meant “eliminating some roles within parts of our AGI organization”.
The people at the top left first
