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.