AWS launches new Nova AI models and service that gives customers more control

Amazon Web Services is rolling out a slate of new on-premises AI models and a service for enterprise customers to create their own custom versions.

The cloud provider launched Nova 2, a fleet of four new AI models for its Nova model family, during AWS CEO Matt Garman’s AWS re:Invent keynote on Tuesday.

The first release of AWS Nova was Announced last year At the company’s annual technical conference. At that time, the company released four text generation templates and one image generation template. This year, AWS is upgrading the models and launching a companion service.

“The momentum has been really great,” Jarman said during his keynote on Tuesday. “Nova has evolved to be used by tens of thousands of customers today, from marketing giants to technology leaders like Infosys, Blue Origin or Robinhood to innovative startups like NinjaTech AI, and today, we’re making Nova even better.”

The four new models include the Nova 2 Lite, a more cost-effective Logic model. AI models “think” before they respond and can process text, images and videos to create personalized text for everyday tasks. Nova 2 Pro is a thinking agent that can process text, images, videos and speech designed for “highly complex tasks” such as programming.

Nova 2 Sonic is a new speech-to-speech model for use in conversational AI. Nova 2 Omni is a multimedia reasoning and generation model that can process images, text, video, speech input, and produce text and images.

Along with the model upgrades, AWS also announced a new service called Nova Forge that allows AWS cloud customers to create their own frontier version of AWS Nova models called Novellas for $100,000 per yearAccording to a CNBC report. This service allows organizations to access pre-trained, mid-trained or post-trained models for companies to then train on their proprietary data.

Jarman said this would be able to solve some of the problems that arise when companies try to incorporate their own data into already-trained AI models.

“The more you customize the models, the more you add a bunch of data post-training, those models tend to forget some of the interesting things they learned previously, which is the basic logic,” Jarman said. “It’s a bit like humans trying to learn a new language. When you start when you’re very young, it’s relatively easy to learn, but when you try and learn a new language later in life, it’s actually much harder. And typical training is like that too.”

Companies including Reddit, Sony, and Booking.com are among the first customers of Nova Forge.

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