Amazon simply unveiled Nova, a brand new household of AI fashions that places the tech large squarely within the race to construct frontier AI techniques. And the timing isn’t any coincidence—it comes proper as founder Jeff Bezos returns to assist information the corporate’s AI technique.
However in an more and more crowded discipline of tech giants constructing their very own AI fashions, what makes Nova important?
I obtained the news from Advertising and marketing AI Institute founder and CEO Paul Roetzer on Episode 126 of The Synthetic Intelligence Present.
Contained in the Nova Household of Fashions
Introduced at Amazon’s re:Invent convention, the Nova suite consists of:
4 text-generating fashions (Micro, Mild, Professional, and Premiere)
Nova Canvas for picture technology
Nova Reel for video creation
The fashions boast spectacular capabilities.
Even the smallest mannequin, Micro, can deal with as much as 100,000 phrases, whereas bigger fashions can course of as much as 225,000 phrases or half-hour of footage. Amazon plans to broaden this to over 2 million tokens for some fashions in early 2025.
On the media technology entrance, Nova Canvas creates and edits pictures with management over colour schemes and layouts, whereas Nova Reel can generate movies as much as six seconds lengthy (with two-minute capabilities promised quickly). Each embrace built-in safeguards together with watermarking and content material moderation techniques.
Wanting forward, AWS has introduced plans for 2 extra fashions: a speech-to-speech mannequin in Q1 2025 and an “any-to-any” mannequin in mid-2025 that guarantees to deal with a number of kinds of enter and output.
The Large Image Will get Sophisticated
Amazon’s transfer comes at an fascinating time. The corporate not too long ago invested billions in Anthropic whereas concurrently working to cut back its reliance on exterior AI suppliers by constructing in-house capabilities.
“This entire area is complicated proper now,” says Roetzer. “Everyone’s constructing their very own fashions and doing offers with different people who find themselves constructing fashions.”
There additionally may be extra to this technique than meets the attention—at the very least for Amazon.
“I might think about they’re constructing a variety of these fashions as a result of they see the chance to remodel Amazon internally,” he says.
“My guess is that they’re largely specializing in inside functions after which they’re, as a by product, in a position to additionally construct and open up these fashions and possibly drive totally different makes use of of AWS.”
And a Crowded Area Will get Extra Crowded
With Nova’s launch, the sphere of firms constructing frontier AI fashions continues to broaden.
OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, xAI, Meta, Nvidia, and Amazon are all constructing their very own frontier fashions. It’s also possible to throw in Mistral and Cohere as mannequin gamers, too.
What does that imply?
Doubtless, it means buckle up for some severe AI acceleration.
“You’ve the most important firms on the planet who’ve tens of billions of {dollars} of R&D cash yearly to construct these large frontier fashions,” says Roetzer.
As this acceleration performs out, Roetzer is paying shut consideration to how the frontier mannequin firms themselves are hiring with the intention to gauge the affect of more and more smarter fashions on the financial system at giant.
“I maintain making an attempt to concentrate to: Are they nonetheless hiring?,” says Roetzer.
“Are these firms nonetheless hiring advertising individuals and gross sales individuals and HR individuals? The way in which we’ll know once we’re beginning to see the affect on the financial system is when the hiring practices of the frontier mannequin firms change as a result of the tech they’ve constructed has enabled them to alter the best way they rent and promote and retain staff.”
