Amazon introduced a range of artificial intelligence foundational models at its flagship annual event Amazon Web Services re: Invent, called Nova, which will allow for text, image and video generation.

It marks Amazon’s biggest step towards strengthening its position against the forerunners like Microsoft, Google, Meta and Open AI, the creator of ChatGPT.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the “ Nova” models at the keynote address by AWS CEO Matt Garman on Tuesday morning. Mr. Jassy said that the Nova is a result of demand from developers who wanted “better latency”, “lower cost” and ability to fine-tune. These will help customers automate their services.

The AWS is providing a range of Nova models to cover the entire delta of utility and price range. Four of these models - micro, lite, pro and premier are text generating models. In addition to those, it also introduced image-generation model Nova Canvas and video generating model Nova Reel.

“Inside Amazon, we have about 1,000 generative AI applications in motion, and we have had a bird’s eye view of what application builders are still grappling with,” Rohit Prasad senior Vice President of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence said. “Our new Amazon Nova models are intended to help with these challenges for internal and external builders and provide compelling intelligence and content generation while also delivering meaningful progress on latency, cost-effectiveness, customisation, information grounding and agentic capabilities,” Mr. Prasad added.

There is a growing demand for video generation from a single image or text prompt. Many platforms including OpenAI already offer it. Amazon on Tuesday said its Nova Reel software allows users to make six-second videos that can be useful for companies to display their products on their website or marketplace. Videos of up to two-minutes will be available in the coming months.

AWS is projecting the Amazon Nova creative generation models as tools to barriers for sellers and advertisers. Giving an example, on AWS blog, the company shared a video advertisement for a fictional boxed pasta brand. In the whimsical “ Pasta City” buildings are sculpted from towering tubes of cannelloni noodles, the neighbourhood is sprinkled with Italian spice landscaping and the streets are lined with marinara sauce. The 18 second video is being shown as what the advertisers can do with the tool.

AWS CEO Matt Garman also announced a host of new capabilities for Amazon Bedrock, one of its flagship products.The company also introduced Trianium 3 its next generation AI chip to deal with generative AI workloads. It will hit the market only by late 2025.

The author is at AWS re:Invent 2024 in Las Vegas at the invitation of AWS