Olympus has dropped (aka, Amazon Nova Micro|Lite|Pro|Premier|Canvas|Reel)
Amazon announced the Amazon Nova family of multimodal foundation models at AWS Re:Invent, available immediately with no waitlist in configurations like Micro, Lite, Pro, Canvas, and Reel, with Premier and speech-to-speech coming next year. These models offer 2-4x faster token speeds and are 25%-400% cheaper than competitors like Anthropic Claude models, positioning Nova as a serious contender in AI engineering. Pricing undercuts models such as Google DeepMind Gemini Flash 8B, and some Nova models extend context length up to 300k tokens. However, benchmarking controversy exists as some evaluations show Nova scoring below Llama-3 70B in LiveBench AI metrics. Separately, CycleQD was introduced by Sakana AI Labs, using evolutionary computation for population-based model merging to develop niche LLM agents.