After years of focusing on AI infrastructure, Amazon is plunging into the frontier model business with the Nova series. The new family of generative AI models includes the text-to-text model Amazon Nova Micro and Amazon Nova Lite for fast, mobile-friendly apps, and at the upper echelon the multimodal Amazon Nova Pro and Amazon Nova Premier for processing text, images and video. Amazon, which is heavy into production via Amazon Studios and MGM, is also launched two specialty models focused on “studio quality” output — Amazon Nova Canvas for images and Amazon Nova Reel for video.

“Amazon’s position in the ongoing generative AI race has been mainly focused on building out its developer tools and platforms … but no longer,” writes VentureBeat, reporting that the move into generative AI models was announced at AWS re:Invent by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who said the Nova family will allow “users to generate text, images, and videos — pitting it right up against the likes of OpenAI, Google, and even its own investment Anthropic.”

“We’re committed to delivering generative AI solutions that offer real-world value to our customers,” Amazon explained in a news post. “Our goal is to use AI to simplify the lives of shoppers, sellers, advertisers, enterprises, and everyone in between” by having Nova-powered apps that help people “understand videos, charts, and documents, or generate videos and other multimedia content.”

TechCrunch breaks down the functionality of the Nova entries, with the text-generating entries “optimized for 15 languages,” but mainly English.

“Micro can only take in text and output text but delivers the lowest latency of the bunch — processing text and generating responses the fastest,” TechCrunch explains, adding Lite’s sweet spot is processing “image, video, and text inputs reasonably quickly.” Pro aims to provide “a balanced combination of accuracy, speed, and cost for a range of tasks,” while “Premier is the most capable, designed for complex workloads,” TechCrunch reports.

“Inside Amazon, we have about 1,000 generative AI applications in motion,” Amazon Artificial General Intelligence SVP Rohit Prasad said in a press release, emphasizing the depth of experience operating Amazon Web Services has provided the company as to developer challenges, internal and external.

“Whether you’re developing document processing applications that need to process images and text, creating marketing content at scale, or building AI assistants that can understand and act on visual information,” Amazon Nova can help “with two categories of models: understanding and creative content generation,” according to an Amazon blog post.

The Nova models will be available exclusively through Amazon Bedrock, a managed service that offers access to models from leading companies (including Anthropic, AI21, Mistral, Meta, Stability AI and, coming soon, Luma) through a single API.

Whether Amazon will become a major player in the very niche foundation model space remains to be seen, but its re:Invent 2024 news of building an AI training supercomputer with Anthropic indicates it is serious about the effort.