(Amazon AWS)

Amazon rolls out updated Trainium chip, new AI models at re:Invent conference

A flurry of product announcements from the developer conference in Las Vegas present a road map for Amazon’s AI computing dominance.

Jon Keegan

12/2/25 3:04PM

Today in Las Vegas, at its annual re:Invent developer conference, Amazon AWS made a bunch of product announcements that reveal its plan to continue capitalizing on the AI boom.

AWS currently enjoys a substantial lead in the cloud computing market, serving up AI infrastructure in the cloud to customers large and small using the models of their choice.

Trainium3

Probably the most consequential announcement was about the company’s new Trainium3 custom AI chip. Three years out from ChatGPT’s disruptive debut, AI companies are diversifying their computing resources away from GPU juggernaut Nvidia and starting to sample the price and performance benefits of alternative custom chips, such as Trainium.

Today, AWS announced the Trainium3 UltraServer, powered by the new Trainium3 chips. The company said the Trainium3 chips are 4x as fast and can train models for half the cost of the previous generation. AWS CEO Matt Garman acknowledged the misleading name of the chip, which excels not only at training AI models but also running AI models, known as inference.

“People often give us a little bit of a hard time about product naming in AWS. No, no, it’s true. Well, it turns out Trainium is no exception. We named it Trainium because it’s designed to be an awesome chip for Al training, and it is, but as it turns out, Trainium2 is actually the best system in the world currently for inference,” Garman said.

The company said work on Trainium4 is well underway, and the chips would be compatible with Nvidia systems.

Nova 2 models

Amazon announced updates to its own frontier AI model family called Nova:

Nova Lite (fast and cheap for everyday tasks),
Nova Pro (for complex reasoning workloads),
Nova Sonic (a new speech-to-speech model), and
Nova Omni (an “all-in-one model for multimodal reasoning and image generation”).

The new models may help the company offer cheaper, more efficient AI computing for its customers versus running competing frontier models on popular Nvidia GPUs.

Nova Forge

Complementing the new Nova 2 models is a product called “Nova Forge,” which makes it easier to train customized models using the Nova models as a base. Customers can bring custom data into the training process to easily create specialized expert models using the tool.

AI Factories

Amazon is also rolling out a way for customers to run AWS services inside their own data centers, keeping their data under their control. Amazon AI Factories works with both Amazon Trainium chips as well as Nvidia GPUs. Amazon said an AI factory is like deploying your own private AWS region.

Agents, agents, agents

AI agents were mentioned quite a bit during the keynote, and the company had lots of new offerings to help customers deploy autonomous AI helpers.

Nova Act: A new AWS service that lets customers spin up “fleets of reliable AI agents for automating production UI workflows.”

DevOps Agent: A new “frontier agent” that autonomously helps solve software failures on production systems when human engineers aren’t online. Amazon describes the new agent as “our always-on, autonomous on-call engineer.”

Rani Molla7h

Epic scores two victories as “Fortnite” returns to Google Play and appeals court keeps injunction against Apple

“Fortnite” maker Epic Games notched two wins Thursday in its drawn-out battle against Big Tech’s app stores. “Fortnite” returned to the Google Play app store in the US, Reuters reports, as Epic continues working with Google to secure court approval for their settlement.

Meanwhile, a US appeals court partly reversed sanctions against Apple in Epic’s antitrust case, calling parts of the order overly broad, but upheld the contempt finding and left a sweeping injunction in place — keeping pressure on Apple to allow developers to steer users to outside payment options and reduce its tight control over how apps can communicate and monetize on iOS.

So many reasons to drop in this month... and now we're on Google Play in the U.S. too!

Android: https://t.co/Z6pkYqYsRI
iPhone: https://t.co/JNpTVneGMN
PC: https://t.co/CPsjp3XNdo pic.twitter.com/TV9b1ZlqfJ
— Fortnite (@Fortnite) December 11, 2025

Jon Keegan7h

Report: AI-powered toys tell kids where to find matches, parrot Chinese government propaganda

You may want to think twice before buying your kids a fancy AI-powered plush toy.

A new report from NBC News found that several AI-powered kids toys could easily be steered to dangerous as well as sexually explicit conversations in a shocking demonstration of the loose safety guardrails in this novel category of consumer electronics.

A report out by the Public Interest Research Group details what researchers found when they tested five AI-powered toys for kids bought from Amazon. Some of the toys offered instructions on where to find matches and how to start fires.

NBC News also bought some of these toys and found they parroted Chinese government propaganda and gave instructions for how to sharpen knives. Some of the toys also discussed inappropriate topics for kids, like sexual kinks.

The category of AI-powered kids toys is under scrutiny as major AI companies like OpenAI have announced partnerships with toy manufacturers like Mattel (which has yet to release an AI-powered toy).

AI toys for kids talk about sex and issue Chinese Communist Party talking points, tests show

The category of AI-powered kids toys is under scrutiny as major AI companies like OpenAI have announced partnerships with toy manufacturers like Mattel (which has yet to release an AI-powered toy).

Jon Keegan7h

OpenAI releases GPT-5.2, the “best model yet for real-world, professional use”

After feeling the heat from Google’s recent launch of its powerful Gemini 3 model, OpenAI’s response to its “code red” has been released, reportedly on an accelerated schedule to keep up with the competition.

The company’s new flagship model, GPT-5.2, is out, and the company is calling it “the most capable model series yet for professional knowledge work.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman called it the “smartest generally-available model in the world” and shared benchmarks that showed it achieving higher scores than Gemini 3 Pro and Anthopic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in some software engineering tests and abstract reasoning, math, and science problems.

In a press release announcing the new model, the company said: “Overall, GPT‑5.2 brings significant improvements in general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision — making it better at executing complex, real-world tasks end-to-end than any previous model.”

Introducing GPT-5.2

Rani Molla9h

Google sinks on a string of bad news

Google is currently down nearly 2% amid a flurry of bad news for the tech giant:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Google’s much-touted Gemini 3 model “had less of an impact on our metrics than maybe we feared.”
Disney sent Google a cease and desist letter accusing it of infringing Disney’s copyrights after announcing a $1 billion investment in competitor OpenAI.
Waymo recalled basically all of its vehicles — 3,067 — for a software update to fix a high-profile problem they had with driving past stopped school buses.
The AI trade generally is struggling today after Oracle posted underwhelming earnings results yesterday.

Jon Keegan10h

Altman: Gemini 3 had less of an impact than we had feared

There have been a lot “code reds” flying around the AI world recently. But it turns out that the latest, declared by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, may not be as dire as expected.

This morning Altman appeared on CNBC with Disney CEO Bob Iger to discuss Disney’s $1 billion investment in OpenAI. Altman told CNBC that Google’s Gemini 3 has “had less of an impact on our metrics than maybe we feared.”