Amazon doubles down on AI with next-gen 'Nova' models

Amazon has unveiled a new set of artificial intelligence (AI) foundation models called 'Nova', that offer state-of-the-art intelligence across a wide range of tasks, along with industry-leading price performance.

These AI models will be added to the Amazon Bedrock model library on AWS, the company informed during the annual 'AWS re:Invent' here.

“Inside Amazon, we have about 1,000 generative AI applications in motion, and we've had a bird's-eye view of what application builders are still grappling with,” said Rohit Prasad, SVP of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence.

Our new Amazon Nova models are intended to help with these challenges for internal and external builders, and provide compelling intelligence and content generation while also delivering meaningful progress on latency, cost-effectiveness, customization, Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and agentic capabilities, Prasad explained.

According to the company, Amazon Nova Micro was found to be equal or better than both Meta LLaMa 3.1 8B on all 11 applicable benchmarks, and Google Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B on all 12 applicable benchmarks.

With Amazon Nova Micro's industry-leading speed of 210 output tokens per second, it is ideal for applications that require fast responses, said the company.

In his keynote address, AWS CEO Matt Garman highlighted how the company is delivering new innovations in generative AI, including new Trainium2 instances, Trainium3 chips, Amazon Nova foundation models and more.

The company said it will introduce an Amazon Nova speech-to-speech model in the first quarter of 2025.

The model is designed to transform conversational AI applications by understanding streaming speech input in natural language, interpreting verbal and non-verbal cues (like tone and cadence), and delivering natural human-like, back-and-forth interactions with low latency.

Amazon is also developing a novel model that can take text, images, audio, and video as input, and generate outputs in any of these modalities.

This Amazon Nova model with native multimodal-to-multimodal – or “any-to-any” modality capabilities – will be introduced mid-year 2025.

AWS also announced the next generation of Amazon SageMaker, unifying the capabilities customers need for fast SQL analytics, petabyte-scale big data processing, data exploration and integration, model development and training, and generative AI into one integrated platform.