Amazon unveils its new family of Nova foundational models

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy took to the stage at the company’s re:Invent conference on Tuesday to show off six new text, image, and video generation models that it calls Amazon Nova.

This new family of multimodal generative AIs includes Nova Micro, a text-only model built for low-cost, low-latency responses; Nova Lite, a low-cost multimodal model for processing image, video, and text inputs; and Nova Pro, its general purpose multimodal model that combines “accuracy, speed, and cost for a wide range of tasks,” per the company’s announcement post. Nova Premier is Amazon’s “most capable … multimodal models for complex reasoning tasks,” while Nova Canvas is a dedicated text-to-image engine and Nova Reel is purpose-built to generate video.

The text-based models have been optimized on 15 different languages. Micro offers a 128,000-token context window while both Lite and Pro can handle up to 300,000 tokens (around 225,000 words or 30 minutes of video). The company plans to expand the context windows of its larger models up to 2 million tokens by early next year. 

Canvas enables users to generate and edit images using natural language prompts. Reels, which will compete with the likes of Gen-3 Alpha, Kling, and Dall-E 3, can generate clips up to six seconds in length from both text prompts and reference images. The video generator also offers camera motion control including pans and zooms.

“We’ve continued to work on our own frontier models,” Jassy told the assembled crowd, “and those frontier models have made a tremendous amount of progress over the last four to five months. And we figured, if we were finding value out of them, you would probably find value out of them.”

Jassy also says that these models are both among the least expensive to operate and fastest in their class, though the company has yet to post benchmark data supporting those claims. “We’ve optimized these models to work with proprietary systems and APIs, so that you can do multiple orchestrated automatic steps — agent behavior — much more easily with these models,” he said. “So I think these are very compelling.”

The Micro, Lite, and Pro models (as well as Canvas and Reels) are all currently available to AWS customers. Premiere is set to arrive in Q1 2025.