Amazon announces new slate of AI models

By Greg Bensinger

LAS VEGAS (Reuters) -Amazon announced a new slate of artificial intelligence platforms, known as foundation models, at its annual AWS conference, allowing for text, image and video generation among other things.

The new offerings pit it against rivals like Adobe (NASDAQ:) and Meta (NASDAQ:) that are racing to serve customers who want to automate more of their services.

Amazon (NASDAQ:)’s CEO Andy Jassy announced the new “Nova” models on Tuesday. Developers, Jassy said, had a list of desires, prompting the new services.

“They want better latency. They want lower cost. They want the ability to do fine tuning,” Jassy said.

The announcements at the conference in Las Vegas are Amazon’s biggest step toward combating a reputation that it was caught flatfooted in developing AI applications as competitors sped ahead.

Video generation from a single image or text prompt has been particularly hot, with Adobe, Meta, OpenAI and Tik Tok parent ByteDance, among others, all announcing new such AI applications. Amazon on Tuesday said its Nova Reel software allows users to make six-second videos that can be useful for, say, displaying products on the Amazon website. Videos of up to two minutes will be available in the coming months, Amazon said.

Entertainment industry technologists are eager to get their hands on such tools to more efficiently enhance and expedite filmmaking capabilities. Still, others worry that such systems could infringe on copyrighted works.

Also on Tuesday, Amazon said it had developed Canvas for generating images from short text prompts. Jassy emphasized that Amazon would include watermarking to ensure the software is used responsibly to prevent harmful content from being spread.

Other offerings announced Tuesday are meant to speed the time it takes to process and analyze text.