Amazon announces new Nova AI models with focus on affordability
Amazon has unveiled a new set of artificial intelligence (AI) foundation models, called "Nova." They will be added to the Amazon Bedrock model library on AWS. The tech giant announced three "understanding" models: Amazon Nova Micro, a text model optimized for speed and cost; Amazon Nova Lite, a "very low-cost" multimodal model that takes images, videos, and text as input to generate text; and Amazon Nova Pro, a highly capable multimodal model.
About the new AI models
With a context length of 128K tokens, Amazon Nova Micro is designed for tasks such as text summarization, translation, interactive chat, and simple mathematical reasoning and coding. Amazon Nova Lite can handle real-time customer interactions, document analysis, and visual question-answering tasks. It processes inputs up to 300K tokens in length and can analyze multiple images or up to 30 minutes of video in a single request. Amazon Nova Pro is capable of processing up to 300K input tokens.
Amazon to launch Nova Premier in early 2025
Amazon is also working on another model, the Amazon Nova Premier. Touted as the company's "most capable multimodal model for complex reasoning tasks," it will launch in early 2025. The company also plans to launch content generation models such as Amazon Nova Canvas, an image generation model, and Amazon Nova Reel, a video generation model with watermarking capabilities for responsible AI use.
Amazon's future AI plans and partnerships
Later in 2025, Amazon plans to introduce a speech-to-speech model and a native multimodal-to-multimodal model. The announcements were made at the ongoing AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Amazon also revealed its partnership with Anthropic on developing a massive AI compute cluster with its Trainium 2 chips. Backed by an $8 billion investment from Amazon, the project will yield "the world's largest AI compute cluster reported to date available for Anthropic to build and deploy its future models on."
Amazon's AI offerings gain traction among large enterprises
Amazon's AI advancements are in line with a broader tech industry trend, where companies like OpenAI are also making significant strides. However, Amazon's established reputation and extensive internet infrastructure powered by AWS could give it an edge in attracting large enterprises to its AI offerings. This was underscored when an Apple executive took the stage at re:Invent to discuss their reliance on Amazon's custom AI chips.
Amazon's AI-powered Alexa launch delayed to next year
Along with its Nova models, Amazon is also working on a revamped, AI-powered version of Alexa. However, the launch of this voice assistant, which was initially scheduled for fall 2024, has been pushed to next year. The delay shows that while Amazon is making giant strides in AI technology with its Nova models and partnerships like Anthropic, it also struggles to bring them to market quickly.
