In its most audacious move to date, Amazon unveiled a suite of AI models on Tuesday to take on rival tech giants in the rapidly expanding field of generative AI.
Amazon’s latest move to fortify its position against industry leaders Microsoft, Google, Meta, and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is the introduction of its own line of foundation models.
Up until this point, the majority of Amazon’s AI offerings through its AWS cloud service had been restricted to giving users access to models from other businesses, such as Anthropic, an AI startup that it supports.
AWS is still the market leader in cloud computing, which is required to power artificial intelligence tools and products, even though Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have taken the lead in AI.
Senior vice president Rohit Prasad, who is in charge of Amazon’s AI initiatives, stated, “We have about 1,000 Gen AI applications in motion inside Amazon, and we’ve had a bird’s-eye view of what application builders are still grappling with.”
“Our new Amazon Nova models are intended to help with these challenges,” he stated.
Six AI models in the Amazon Nova family can perform tasks ranging from creating text to video generation.
The company says the models are at least 75 percent cheaper than comparable offerings available on AWS servers and faster than similar models.
The initial lineup includes Nova Micro for fast text processing, Nova Lite for basic multimedia tasks, and Nova Premiere, set for an early 2025 release, for complex reasoning.
Supporting 200 languages, the models can be customized using customers’ proprietary data – a feature Amazon hopes will attract enterprises developing specialized AI applications.
Two dedicated models target creative content: Nova Canvas for image generation and Nova Reel for video creation.
Amazon emphasized built-in safety measures for the new offerings, which will be available through AWS’s Bedrock service, with usage guidelines detailing specific use cases and limitations.
