Amazon Has New Frontier AI Models—and a Way for Customers to Build Their Own

The ecommerce giant announced the second generation of its Nova AI models at re:Invent, a company conference held in Las Vegas. The models are nowhere near as popular as those offered by rivals like OpenAI and Google, but Amazon’s plan to make them highly customizable could see them gain traction with its cloud users.

Amazon detailed two improved large language models, Nova Lite and Nova Pro; a new realtime voice model called Nova Sonic; and a more experimental model called Nova Omni that performs a simulated kind of reasoning using images, audio, and video as well as text. The new models are being made available today to a limited number of customers.

More significantly, given the importance of its cloud business, Amazon is also releasing a tool called Nova Forge that will let customers create specialized frontier models by adding their own training data to unfinished versions of ...