Introducing Amazon Nova: A New Generation of Foundation Models

Amazon.com Inc introduced Amazon Nova, a new generation of foundation models (FMs) that have state-of-the-art intelligence across a wide range of tasks, and industry-leading price performance. Amazon Nova models will be available in Amazon Bedrock, and include: Amazon Nova Micro (a very fast, text-to-text model); and Amazon Nova Lite, Amazon Nova Pro, and Amazon Nova Premier (multi-modal models that can process text, images, and videos to generate text). Amazon also launched two additional models – Amazon Nova Canvas (which generates studio-quality images) and Amazon Nova Reel (which generates studio-quality videos).

“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.”

Amazon Nova understanding models demonstrate exceptional intelligence, capabilities, and speed

Amazon Nova includes four state-of-the-art models. The first, Amazon Nova Micro, is a text-only model that delivers the lowest latency responses at very low cost. The next three are: Amazon Nova Lite, a very low-cost multimodal model that is lightning fast for processing image, video, and text inputs; Amazon Nova Pro, a highly capable multimodal model with the best combination of accuracy, speed, and cost for a wide range of tasks; and Amazon Nova Premier, the most capable of Amazon’s multimodal models for complex reasoning tasks and for use as the best teacher for distilling custom models. Amazon Nova Micro, Amazon Nova Lite, and Amazon Nova Pro are generally available today; Amazon Nova Premier will be available in the Q1 2025 timeframe.

Multi-lingual and Multimodal Support with Long Context

Amazon Nova Micro, Lite, and Pro support over 200 languages. Amazon Nova Micro supports context length of 128K input tokens, whereas Amazon Nova Lite and Amazon Nova Pro support context length of 300K tokens, or 30 minutes of video processing. In early 2025, Amazon will support context length of over 2M input tokens.

Fast and cost-effective

All Amazon Nova models are fast, cost-effective and have been designed to be easy to use with a customer’s systems and data. Amazon Nova Micro, Amazon Nova Lite, and Amazon Nova Pro are at least 75 percent less expensive than the best performing models in their respective intelligence classes in Amazon Bedrock. They are also the fastest models in their respective intelligence classes in Amazon Bedrock.

Seamless integration with Amazon Bedrock

All Amazon Nova models are integrated with Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes high-performing FMs from leading AI companies and Amazon available for use through a single API. Using Amazon Bedrock, customers can easily experiment with and evaluate Amazon Nova models, as well as other FMs, to determine the best model for an application.

Support for fine-tuning to boost accuracy

The models also support custom fine-tuning, which allows customers to point the models to examples in their own proprietary data that have been labeled to boost accuracy. The Amazon Nova model learns what matters most to the customer from their own data (including text, images, and videos), and then Amazon Bedrock trains a private fine-tuned model that will provide tailored responses.

Distillation to train smaller, more efficient models

In addition to supporting fine-tuning, the models also support distillation, which enables the transfer of specific knowledge from a larger, highly-capable “teacher model” to a smaller, more efficient model that is highly accurate, but also faster and cheaper to run.

RAG to ground responses in data

Amazon Nova models are integrated with Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases and excel at Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), which enables customers to ensure the best accuracy, by grounding responses in an organization’s own data.

Optimized for agentic applications

Amazon Nova models have been optimized to make them easy to use and effective in agentic applications that require interacting with an organization’s proprietary systems and data through multiple APIs to execute multistep tasks.

Access to production-grade visual content with Nova creative content generation models

Amazon Nova Canvas is a state-of-the-art image generation model that creates professional grade images from text or images provided in prompts. Amazon Nova Canvas also provides features that make it easy to edit images using text inputs, and provides controls for adjusting color scheme and layout. The model comes with built-in controls to support safe and responsible AI use. These include features like watermarking, which allows the source of an image to always be traced, and content moderation, which limits the generation of potentially harmful content. Amazon Nova Canvas performs better than image generators such as OpenAI DALL-E 3 and Stable Diffusion in side-by-side human evaluations conducted by a third party, and on key automated metrics.

Amazon Nova Reel is a state-of-the-art video generation model that allows customers to easily create high-quality video from text and images.It is ideal for content creation in advertising, marketing, or training. Customers can use natural language prompts to control visual style and pacing, including camera motion, rotation, and zooming. It outperforms comparable models in quality and consistency, according to side-by-side human evaluations conducted by a third party that preferred Amazon Nova Reel-generated videos over those generated by Runway’s Gen-3 Alpha. Like Amazon Nova Canvas, Amazon Nova Reel comes with built-in controls to support safety and responsible AI use, including watermarking and content moderation. Amazon Nova Reel currently generates six-second videos, and will support the generation of videos of up to two-minutes in length in the coming months.

What’s next: Speech-to-Speech and Multimodal-to-Multimodal models

Amazon 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. It will simplify the development of applications where the same model can be used to perform a wide variety of tasks, such as translating content from one modality to another, editing content, and powering AI agents that can understand and generate all modalities.

Amazon is committed to the responsible development of artificial intelligence

Amazon Nova models are built with integrated safety measures and protections. The company has launched AWS AI Service Cards for Amazon Nova, offering transparent information on use cases, limitations, and responsible AI practices. For more information, explore the Service Cards here: Amazon Nova Canvas, Amazon Nova Reel, and Amazon Nova Micro, Amazon Nova Lite, Amazon Nova Pro.

Last Updated on 5 days by News Desk 1