Amazon Web Services is rolling out a number 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 for 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 technology 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 great,” 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 the Nova 2 Lite, a more cost-effective reasoning model. Rationale AI models “think” before they act and can process text, images and videos to generate text intended for everyday tasks. The Nova 2 Pro is a reasoner that can process text, images, videos and speech, 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.
In addition to 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 gives companies access to pre-trained, mid-trained or post-trained models, so companies can train on their own proprietary data.
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Garman said this will be able to solve some of the problems that arise when companies try to incorporate their own data into already trained AI models.
“The more you fit models, the more you add a lot of data after training, those models tend to forget some of the interesting things that they learned earlier, the basic idea,” Garman said. “It’s a bit like people trying to learn a new language. When you start when you’re really young, it’s actually relatively easy to pick up, but when you try it, you learn a new language later in life, it’s actually much, much harder. Model training is also like that.”
Companies including Reddit, Sony and Booking.com are early Nova Forge customers.
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