Amazon debuts Nova Forge and next-gen chips
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Amazon Web Services announced a flurry of new chips and models on Tuesday along with a new offering that allows businesses to integrate their own data to train custom versions of frontier models.
Why it matters: Amazon is trying to define itself as more than just a low-cost cloud provider to run other companies' models.
Driving the news: Announced at its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, Nova Forge allows companies to inject their own data at various stages of training.
- Amazon says the feature offers enterprises custom AI models with more industry-specific knowledge.
- Early customers include Booking.com, Cosine AI, Nimbus Therapeutics, Nomura Research Institute, OpenBabylon, Reddit and Sony.
What they're saying: In an exclusive interview with Axios, AWS CEO Matt Garman said the company is delivering on an oft-expressed need.
- "What I hear over and over and over again is 'What I would really love is a frontier agent or a frontier model that actually just understands my data,'" he said.
State of play: AWS also announced the Nova 2 family of Amazon-designed models, including a smaller text-only model, a new speech model and Nova 2 Omni, a reasoning model that can process text, images, video and speech and output both text and images.
- AWS also announced its entry into the agent space: Nova Act, currently in trials at Hertz and 1Password.
By the numbers: The new AWS Trainium3-based servers can deliver roughly four times as much compute performance and energy efficiency, the company says.
- Early customers include Anthropic and Ricoh.
The big picture: Whereas it recently seemed as if OpenAI was running away with the AI race, Google — and now Amazon — are making the case that there is plenty of competition.
- "A year ago, there were questions about whether we'd missed the wave, but now, most people are building their production systems in AWS because of what we've built over the past couple of years," Garman told Axios. "People are now realizing that Amazon has a great platform for AI."
