The latest amazon/nvidia linux ami was released in March but still uses CUDA7.5.
Other AMIs have been available with CUDA8 for six months.
Why would nvidia not be wanting people to use the latest version? Is it not reliable?
It’s a tradeoff between giving unsophisticated users some help in getting started with AWS cloud GPU instances, and putting a higher level of effort into maintaining a stable of AWS AMIs for various purposes.
It’s not a statement that NVIDIA does not want people to use the latest version. We are a resource constrained company, and updating this to CUDA 8 with a proper checkout and review simply hasn’t made the priority list cut yet.
Sophisticated AWS users will generally use their own AMI definitions, anyway. And it may be that the first AMI listed here (DIGITS 4) is a CUDA 8 AMI, although I haven’t checked that to be sure: