Amazon’s new Nova AI models could be ground-breaking – why we can’t know for certain [Video]

Most reports on AWS’ re:Invent conference earlier this month, which brought us new chips and new data centers, overlooked the cloud giant’s unveiling of its first “frontier” models in generative artificial intelligence, code that can compete with the best from OpenAI and Google.

Amazon debuted Nova, a “new generation of state-of-the-art foundation models that deliver frontier intelligence and industry-leading price performance.”

Also: Amazon AWS unveils Trainium3 chip, Project Rainier

Having sat out the battle of frontier performance while Google’s Gemini and OpenAI’s GPT-4 got all the attention, Amazon is making haste to catch up. Nova’s models, which handle multiple modalities that include text and image, come in flavors suited to video generation (akin to OpenAI’s Sora) and image generation, which has become standard fare for large language models that integrate text and images.

The models come with snappy names, too: “Reel” is the name of the video-generation model, and “Canvas” is …