Amazon Announces Nova, it’s New Family of Multimodal AI Models

Key Points:

• Nova includes six models: four for text generation/understanding (Micro, Lite, Pro, Premier) and two for creative tasks (Canvas, Reel).
• Nova models are available on Amazon Bedrock, integrating seamlessly with AWS infrastructure.
• Models are designed for versatility, scalability, and affordability, offering customization for specific business needs.

At its re:Invent conference this Tuesday, AWS unveiled Amazon Nova, a new family of multimodal generative AI models designed for versatility and scale. With this announcement, AWS has entered the foundation frontier model race with its first serious contender. This launch introduces six distinct models under the Nova brand, with each targeting specific use cases across text, image, and video generation.

There are four text-generating models: Micro, Lite, Pro, and Premier, with the first three available to AWS customers starting today. The top-tier Premier model is expected to launch early next year, according to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

In addition, AWS debuted two creative content models—Nova Canvas and Nova Reel—now also available to customers. These models expand Amazon’s offering beyond text, venturing into the realm of high-quality images and videos generated from simple text prompts.

The big picture: The different Amazon Nova models are designed to address various business needs while balancing performance, accuracy, and cost-efficiency:

• Amazon Nova Micro: A text-only model focused on ultra-fast, low-latency responses at an economical rate. Perfect for tasks like summarization, translation, brainstorming, and basic code completion.
• Amazon Nova Lite: Capable of understanding text, image, and video inputs. It’s designed for interactive applications needing speed and low cost, such as visual question answering, document analysis, and customer interaction.
• Amazon Nova Pro: Combines multimodal capabilities with top-tier accuracy and speed, suitable for advanced applications—from video summarization to software development assistance.
• Amazon Nova Premier: Set for release in early 2025, Premier aims to handle complex reasoning tasks and serve as a leading model for teaching and distilling custom applications.

For creative tasks, Amazon introduced Nova Canvas and Nova Reel:

• Nova Canvas generates professional-grade images from text or image prompts.
• Nova Reel produces short videos with natural language controls over style and camera movement.

For the enterprise: These models are built on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s platform for foundational AI models, providing seamless integration with existing AWS infrastructure. That means businesses can tap into these models without the cumbersome process of building entirely new tech stacks. Andy Jassy emphasized that Nova models are designed to help enterprises of all sizes deploy AI with ease—whether to process complex visual data, create engaging marketing content, or develop sophisticated AI-driven customer service tools.

Each model supports fine-tuning, allowing businesses to adapt Nova to their specific needs—from training a legal assistant to better understand law-specific terminologies to crafting a marketing model tuned to match a particular brand’s tone.

Between the lines: Amazon is banking on price-performance to distinguish Nova in an increasingly competitive landscape, especially as businesses weigh the costs of adopting AI solutions. Nova Micro, Lite, and Pro are pitched as industry-leading in their price-to-performance ratio, offering scalable solutions that won’t break the bank.

The creative angle: Of note, Nova Canvas (images) and Nova Reel (video) come with built-in safety controls and watermarking, which will help to address growing concerns about AI-generated content authenticity.

The bottom line: AWS is clearly positioning Amazon Nova as an all-purpose AI model family for enterprises wanting to embrace generative AI without spending a fortune on custom development. With its diverse lineup—from text generation to video production—Nova brings a one-stop shop to AWS’s customers, aimed squarely at reducing the barriers to entry for AI adoption across industries.

What to watch: How competitors respond to AWS’s pricing strategy and whether the Premier model, scheduled for early 2025, will deliver capabilities that maintain AWS’s competitive edge in the enterprise AI market.