Amazon announced a new range of artificial intelligence platforms, known as Core Models, at its annual AWS conference, enabling, among other things, the generation of text, images and video.
The new offerings pit it against rivals like Adobe and Meta, which are rushing to serve customers who want to further automate their services.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the new “Nova” models at a conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday. Developers, Jassy said, had a list of wants, which inspired them to create new services.
“They want better latency. They want lower cost. They want to be able to make fine adjustments,” Jassy said.
The announcements mark Amazon’s biggest step in combating a reputation that it had been caught flat-footed in developing AI applications while its competitors forged ahead.
Rohit Prasad, head of artificial general intelligence at Amazon, said the company will compete with rivals on price and capabilities, pointing to what he called faster speeds for the new models. “If I have something better to offer, then customers will come and use it,” he said in an interview.
“It’s still very early” in the development of AI, and so Amazon has the opportunity to take the lead, he said.
Generating videos from a single image or text prompt has been particularly popular, with Adobe, Meta, OpenAI and TikTok parent ByteDance, among others, all announcing new AI applications of this kind. Amazon said Tuesday that its Nova Reel software allows users to create six-second videos that can be useful, for example, for displaying products on Amazon’s website. Videos up to two minutes long will be available in the coming months, Amazon said.
Technologists in the entertainment industry are eager to get their hands on such tools to improve and accelerate filmmaking capabilities more effectively. Yet others worry that such systems could infringe on copyrighted works.
Also on Tuesday, Amazon announced that it had developed Canvas to generate images from short text prompts. Jassy stressed that Amazon would include a watermark to ensure the software is used responsibly to prevent the spread of harmful content.
Other offerings announced Tuesday aim to speed up the time needed to process and analyze text. And in the near future, Amazon plans to introduce an AI model that can take text, images, speech and videos and produce any of them.
In his comments on Tuesday, Jassy said Amazon would release a version of its Alexa voice assistant revamped with AI in the coming months. The project, known internally as Banyan, has faced delays due to concerns about the accuracy and timeliness of its responses, Reuters reported.
Prasad, who previously oversaw Banyan, declined to elaborate, saying only that he is a big optimist about the future of voice assistants.
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