Amazon unveiled a suite of artificial intelligence models on Tuesday in its boldest move yet to compete with tech giant rivals in the fast-growing generative AI sector.
The launch of its own line of foundation models marks Amazon’s latest move to strengthen its position against its predecessors. Microsoft, GoogleMeta and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.
Until now, Amazon’s AI offerings through its AWS cloud service have largely been limited to providing access to models from other companies, including Anthropic, an AI startup it backs.
Even though Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have taken the lead in AI, AWS remains the market leader in cloud computing, needed to power artificial intelligence tools and products.
“Within Amazon, we have about 1,000 Gen AI apps in motion, and we have a bird’s eye view of what app creators are still grappling with,” said senior vice president Rohit Prasad , who leads the company’s AI efforts.
“Our new Amazon Nova the models are intended to help address these challenges,” he added.
The Amazon Nova family includes six AI models handling tasks ranging from text creation to video generation.
The company claims the models are at least 75% cheaper than comparable offerings available on AWS servers and faster than similar models.
The initial lineup includes Nova Micro for fast word processing, Nova Lite for basic multimedia tasks, and Nova Premiere, scheduled for release in early 2025, for complex reasoning.
Supporting 200 languages, models can be personalized using customers’ first-party data – a feature Amazon hopes will attract companies developing specialist AI applications.
Two dedicated models target creative content: Nova Canvas for image generation and Nova Reel for video creation.
Amazon has emphasized built-in security measures for the new offerings, which will be available through AWS’s Bedrock service, with usage guidelines detailing specific use cases and limitations.