Amazon Web Services is introducing a new set of homegrown AI models and a service for enterprise customers to build their own custom versions. The cloud provider launched Nova 2, a fleet of four new AI models added to its Nova model family, during AWS CEO Matt Garman’s keynote at AWS Re:Invent on Tuesday.
The first version of AWS Nova was announced last year at the company’s annual tech conference. At that time, the company released four text-generating models and one image-generating model. This year, AWS is upgrading the models and launching an accompanying service.
During his keynote, Matt Garman noted the strong momentum, stating that Nova is now used by tens of thousands of customers, ranging from marketing giants and tech leaders like Infosys, Blue Origin, and Robinhood to innovative startups like NinjaTech AI.
The four new models include Nova 2 Lite, a more cost-effective reasoning model. Reasoning AI models process text, images, and videos to generate text for everyday tasks. Nova 2 Pro is a reasoning agent designed for highly complex tasks like coding, and it can process text, images, videos, and speech.
Nova 2 Sonic is a new speech-to-speech model intended for conversational AI. Nova 2 Omni is a multimodal reasoning and generation model that can process images, text, video, and speech input to produce both text and images.
Alongside these model upgrades, AWS announced a new service called Nova Forge. This service allows AWS cloud customers to build their own frontier version of AWS Nova models, called Novellas, for $100,000 a year according to CNBC reporting. Nova Forge enables enterprises to access pre-trained, mid-trained, or post-trained models and then train them on their own proprietary data.
Garman explained that this approach addresses problems that arise when enterprises try to incorporate their own data into already-trained AI models. He compared it to language learning, noting that adding data after initial training can cause models to forget earlier core reasoning, much like how learning a new language is easier when young and harder later in life.
Early customers of Nova Forge include companies such as Reddit, Sony, and Booking.com.