Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the release of Amazon Nova, a new generation of foundation models (FMs) that the company claims offer “frontier intelligence and industry-leading price performance.”
As detailed in a blog post on Amazon’s website, Nova is available exclusively through Amazon Bedrock and is designed to provide businesses with a cost-effective and efficient way to leverage generative AI for a variety of tasks.
The Nova suite includes two main categories of models: “understanding” models and “creative content generation” models.
Understanding models are designed for analysing and extracting insights from data, while creative content generation models are used for producing images and videos.
There are four understanding models in the Nova suite. Amazon Nova Micro is a text-only model designed for speed and cost-effectiveness. This model excels at text-based tasks, such as summarisation, translation, and interactive chat, and it can be customised using a business’ proprietary data.
Amazon Nova Lite is a multimodal model that can rapidly process text, images, and video. This model is suitable for tasks such as real-time customer interactions and document analysis.
Amazon Nova Pro offers a balance of accuracy, speed, and cost, and it is capable of processing up to 300,000 input tokens. Amazon Nova Pro is suitable for a wider range of tasks, including those that require interaction with APIs and tools, and it is particularly adept at processing both visual and textual information.
Amazon Nova Premier is currently under development and is expected to be available in early 2025. It is positioned as the most capable model in the suite, suitable for complex reasoning and custom model distillation.
There are also two models designed for creative content generation in the suite.
Amazon Nova Canvas produces high-quality images and offers users precise control over the style and content of the images. It includes features such as inpainting and background removal. Amazon Nova Reel is a video generation model that enables users to create professional-quality video content from text prompts and images.
Amazon emphasises that Nova models can be customised, which allows businesses to adapt them to their specific needs and industry terminologies.
All models in the Nova suite incorporate safety controls, and the creative content generation models include watermarking to promote responsible AI use.
Currently, the Nova models are available in the US East (N. Virginia) region via Amazon Bedrock.
Amazon Nova Micro, Lite, and Pro are also available in the US West (Oregon) and US East (Ohio) regions via cross-Region inference. The pricing follows a pay-as-you-go model. The understanding models can comprehend and generate content in over 200 languages.
