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

Amazon Web Services is rolling out a slate of new 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 to its Nova model family, during AWS CEO Matt Garman’s AWS re:Invent keynote on Tuesday.

The first version of AWS Nova was announced last year at the company’s annual tech conference. At the time, the company released four text-generating models and one image-generating model. This year, AWS is giving the models an upgrade and launching an accompanying service.

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

The four new models include Nova 2 Lite, a more cost-effective reasoning model. Reasoning AI models “think” before they respond and can process text, images, and videos to generate text that’s meant for everyday tasks. Nova 2 Pro is a reasoning agent that can process text, images, videos and speech that is designed for “highly complex tasks” like coding.

Nova 2 Sonic is a new speech-to-speech model to be used for conversational AI. Nova 2 Omni is a multimodal reasoning and generation model that can process images, text, video and speech input, and produce both text and images.

Alongside the model upgrades, AWS also announced a new service called Nova Forge which 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. This service allows enterprises to access pre-trained, mid-trained or post-trained models for companies to then train on their own proprietary data.

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

“The more you customize models, the more you add a bunch of data in post training, these models tend to forget some of that interesting stuff that it learned earlier the core reasoning,” Garman said. “It’s a little bit like humans trying to learn new language. When you start when you’re really young, it’s actually relatively easy to pick up, but when you try to, you learn a new language later in life, it’s actually much, much harder. Model training is kind of like this too.”

Companies including Reddit, Sony and Booking.com are early Nova Forge customers.

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