AWS introduced Amazon Nova, a next-generation foundation model family
Available on Amazon Bedrock, the Amazon Nova lineup includes Nova Micro, a highly efficient text-to-text model, Nova Lite, Nova Pro, and Nova Premier—multimodal models that process text, images, and videos to generate text content.
Amazon also unveiled two additional models: Amazon Nova Canvas, designed to produce studio-quality visuals, and Amazon Nova Reel, which generates professional-grade videos.
Rohit Prasad, Senior Vice President of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence, highlighted Amazon’s unique perspective, saying:
“At Amazon, we use nearly 1,000 AI applications. This gives us a high-level understanding of where developers continue to face challenges. Our new Amazon Nova models aim to help developers both inside and outside of Amazon overcome these barriers. They offer exceptional intelligence and content generation capabilities while advancing latency, cost-effectiveness, personalization, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), and agent-based functionalities.”
Amazon Nova: Intelligence and speed in actionThe Nova lineup includes four models: Amazon Nova Micro leads with ultra-low latency and cost, making it ideal for text-only applications requiring fast responses. The remaining three models push the boundaries of multimodal AI:
- Amazon Nova Lite is a cost-effective option for processing images, video, and text at remarkable speeds.
- Amazon Nova Pro combines accuracy, speed, and cost efficiency for a wide range of tasks, offering advanced capabilities across multiple modalities.
- Amazon Nova Premier stands as Amazon’s most powerful multimodal model, excelling at complex reasoning tasks and serving as an ideal “teacher” for distilling smaller, specialized models.
Amazon Nova Micro, Nova Lite, and Nova Pro are already available for general use, while Nova Premier will launch in Q1 2025.
Performance benchmark resultsNova models were rigorously tested against industry-standard benchmarks. Results show that these models consistently perform on par with or surpass leading alternatives.
- Amazon Nova Micro delivered competitive results, matching or outperforming Meta LLaMa 3.1 8B across 11 benchmarks and Google Gemini 1.5 Flash-8B across 12 benchmarks. With an industry-leading output speed of 210 tokens per second, it is ideal for applications requiring rapid responses.
- Amazon Nova Lite demonstrated strong performance across benchmarks, including accuracy for text tasks and video, chart, and document understanding, excelling in VATEX, ChartQA, and DocVQA tests.
- Amazon Nova Pro showcased its capabilities by outperforming OpenAI GPT-4o in 17 out of 20 benchmarks and delivering exceptional results for RAG workflows, instruction following, and agent-based tasks.
Supporting long context, multilingual, and multimodal tasks
Amazon Nova Micro, Lite, and Pro models support over 200 languages. Nova Micro handles input contexts up to 128,000 tokens, while Nova Lite and Nova Pro support up to 300,000 tokens or 30-minute video processing. Amazon plans to expand this to over 2 million tokens in early 2025.
Cost-effective, high-speed performanceAmazon Nova models are designed to deliver exceptional speed and cost efficiency. Compared to other top-performing models within their intelligence classes on Amazon Bedrock, Nova Micro, Nova Lite, and Nova Pro are at least 75% more cost-effective while offering the fastest performance.
Seamless integration with Amazon BedrockAmazon Nova models integrate directly with Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that gives customers access to foundation models from leading AI providers and Amazon itself through a single API call. With Bedrock, developers can easily test and evaluate Nova models alongside other options to determine the best fit for their applications.
Personalization through fine-tuningAmazon Nova models support personalized fine-tuning, allowing customers to improve accuracy by guiding the models with examples from their own data. The models learn what matters most to a customer—be it text, images, or videos—and Amazon Bedrock then delivers tailored, fine-tuned responses.
Efficient distillation for smaller, specialized modelsIn addition to fine-tuning, Nova supports model distillation, enabling the transfer of knowledge from large, high-capability models to smaller, faster, and more cost-effective models without sacrificing accuracy.
Enhancing accuracy with retrieval-augmented generationAmazon Nova models integrate seamlessly with Amazon Bedrock Knowledge Bases, enabling retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) to deliver responses based on an organization’s own data for the highest levels of accuracy.
Optimized for agent applicationsDesigned to excel in multi-step tasks, Nova models are optimized for agent-based applications requiring interaction with proprietary systems and data via multiple APIs.
Production-quality visual contentAmazon Nova Canvas generates professional-quality images from text or image prompts, with built-in controls for editing, color adjustments, and layouts. Integrated safeguards include watermarking and content moderation to ensure responsible AI use. In evaluations, Nova Canvas outperformed models like OpenAI DALL·E 3 and Stable Diffusion.
Amazon Nova Reel empowers customers to create high-quality videos from text and images. Designed for advertising, marketing, and educational content, it allows control over visual styles, pacing, and camera effects. Nova Reel consistently outperformed competitors, with reviewers preferring its output over Runway Gen-3 Alpha. While currently supporting six-second videos, Nova Reel will expand to two-minute video generation in the coming months.
Looking ahead: Speech and multimodal-to-multimodal modelsIn Q1 2025, Amazon plans to release a speech-to-speech model designed to transform AI applications for natural voice interactions. The model will interpret spoken language, tone, and tempo to deliver human-like responses with minimal latency.
Additionally, Amazon is developing a multimodal-to-multimodal model capable of taking text, images, audio, and video as inputs and producing outputs across any of these modalities. This model, set for mid-2025, will simplify applications requiring content translation, editing, and multimodal understanding.
Early AdoptionSeveral leading organizations are already adopting Nova models:
- SAP integrates Nova models into SAP AI Core to power AI-driven solutions in automation, personalization, and supply chain planning.
- Deloitte is leveraging Nova’s advanced personalization capabilities to deliver tailored generative AI services globally.
- Dentsu Digital Inc. uses Nova Reel to streamline creative video production, reducing campaign timelines from weeks to days.
- Musixmatch incorporates Nova Reel into its platform to help emerging artists generate high-quality music videos.
- 123RF is simplifying design processes for content creators with Nova Canvas and Nova Reel.
- Caylent uses Nova models to accelerate video understanding workflows for media, sports, and retail clients.
- Palantir Technologies integrates Nova Pro with its Ontology System to enhance AI-powered decision-making workflows across industries.
- Shutterstock incorporates Nova Canvas into its AI Image Generator to offer an intuitive solution for high-quality visual content creation.
AWS has released detailed AI Service Cards for Nova models, providing transparency on use cases, limitations, and responsible AI practices: