Amazon introduces AI models to challenge competitors

Amazon unveiled a series of artificial intelligence models on Tuesday, making its boldest move yet to compete with tech giant rivals in the fast-growing generative AI sector.

The launch of its own range of base models marks Amazon’s latest push to strengthen its position against pioneers Microsoft, Google, Meta and OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

To date, Amazon’s AI offerings through its AWS cloud service have been largely limited to providing access to models from other companies, including Anthropic, an Amazon-backed AI startup.

Even as Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have taken the lead in AI, AWS remains the market leader in the cloud computing necessary to deliver artificial intelligence tools and products.

“Amazon has approximately 1,000 Gen AI applications in use, and we’ve seen a bird’s eye view of what application developers are still struggling with,” said Senior Vice President Rohit Prasad, who leads the company’s AI efforts.

“Our new Amazon Nova models are designed to help with these challenges,” he added.

The Amazon Nova family includes six AI models that handle tasks from text creation to video generation.

The company says the models are at least 75 percent cheaper than comparable offerings on AWS servers and faster than similar models.

The initial product range includes Nova Micro for fast word processing, Nova Lite for basic multimedia tasks and Nova Premiere, due out in early 2025, for complex reasoning.

The models support 200 languages ​​and can be customized based on customers’ proprietary data – a feature that Amazon hopes will attract companies developing specialized AI applications.

Two specific models target creative content: Nova Canvas for image creation and Nova Reel for video creation.

Amazon emphasized built-in security measures for the new offerings that will be available through AWS’s Bedrock service, with usage guidelines detailing specific use cases and limitations.

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