Amazon has announced a series of new basic artificial intelligence models under the new “Nova” brand, which will be available as part of the Amazon Bedrock model library on AWS.
Three “understanding” models are currently available, according to Amazon’s blog post:
- Amazon Nova Micro, a text-based model that is “optimized for speed and cost.”
- Amazon Nova Lite, a “very cheap” multimodal model that can take images, video, and text to create text.
- Amazon Nova Pro, a “high-performance” multimodal model.
The company is also preparing a model called Amazon Nova Premier, which it says will be “our highest-performing multimodal model for complex reasoning tasks.” Amazon plans to make Nova Premier available “in early 2025”.
Amazon is also releasing content generation models: Amazon Nova Canvas, a model for creating images, and Amazon Nova Reel, a model for creating videos. The company claims that these models have “watermarking capabilities” to “promote the responsible use of artificial intelligence.” As an example of what’s possible with Nova Reel, Amazon shared this humorous ad for a fake pasta brand.
Later in 2025, Amazon plans to release a voice-to-voice model and a “proprietary multimodal model for multimodal transportation,” according to a blog post.
Amazon announced these new models at the AWS re:Invent conference, which is currently taking place in Las Vegas. At the show, the company also announced that it is building a huge artificial intelligence computing cluster that relies on its Trainium 2 chips in partnership with Anthropic (in which it has invested $8 billion). “Once completed, it is expected to be the world’s largest artificial intelligence computing cluster on which Anthropic can build and deploy its future models,” Amazon said.
The company, like many other major tech players, is rushing to release new AI products and features to stay ahead of new companies like OpenAI. Amazon’s advantage is that a large part of the Internet infrastructure is already powered by AWS – large enterprises may be more willing to use Amazon’s AI products since the company already has a solid reputation. Today, an Apple executive even appeared at re:Invent to talk about how the company relies on Amazon’s own AI chips.
Amazon is also working on an updated Alexa powered by AI, but the voice assistant was reportedly scheduled to launch this fall, but has apparently been pushed back to next year.
