Amazon Internet Companies (AWS) is leaning into the rising development towards customized fashions with a brand new service that it says will let enterprises convey extra personalization and inner data.
The transfer comes alongside the discharge of AWS's new fashions as a part of its Nova household, which expands the capabilities of its reasoning fashions.
Nova 2 Lite, Nova 2 Professional, Nova 2 Sonic and Nova 2 Omni replace the primary Nova fashions AWS introduced final 12 months.
Nova 2 Lite is a quick, cost-effective reasoning mannequin optimized for on a regular basis duties that may course of textual content, pictures and movies to generate textual content. Nova 2 Professional, which AWS mentioned is its most clever reasoning mannequin, can deal with advanced duties equivalent to coding brokers, long-range planning and problem-solving. It could actually act as a “teacher” mannequin for distillation initiatives. Nova 2 Sonic is a speech-to-speech mannequin, whereas Nova 2 Omni allows organizations to generate each textual content and pictures from textual content, picture and video inputs.
Nova Act, AWS's browser agent — introduced as an experimental improvement equipment in April — can also be powered by the Nova 2 fashions and now accessible to clients.
Nonetheless, it’s the customized mannequin service, Nova Forge, that AWS is most enthusiastic about. The service provides clients the flexibility to introduce proprietary knowledge to a pre-trained mannequin with out worry that the mannequin will neglect its earlier coaching.
Nova Forge permits enterprises to create customized, optimized variations of Nova fashions, which it calls “Novellas,” and convey them on to its Amazon Bedrock platform.
Customized mannequin creation
Enterprises are more and more turning to mannequin distillation or customized fashions, particularly with many industries selecting to create basis fashions with domain-specific data. However these can usually be out of attain for a lot of firms, as not everybody can afford a number of Nvidia GPU H100s to construct fashions from scratch. In consequence, they flip to closely fine-tuned open-source off-the-shelf fashions.
“You just don't have a great way to get a frontier model that deeply understands your data and your domain," AWS CEO Matt Garman said during his keynote speech at AWS’s annual re: Invent conference. "But what if it was possible? What if you could integrate your data at the right time during the training of a frontier model, then create a proprietary model that was just for you?”
Nova Forge employs what AWS calls “open training,” which permits builders to mix their proprietary knowledge with an Amazon-curated dataset at each step of mannequin improvement, with checkpoints throughout coaching. AWS mentioned this implies fashions won’t regress on foundational capabilities, equivalent to instruction following, whereas studying company-specific data and directions.
Every “Novella” could possibly be a customized model of Nova 2 Lite, with Nova’s full data and reasoning energy, however with domain-specificity.
Proper now, enterprises can solely make Novellas from Nova 2 Lite, however many will increase to different Nova 2 fashions quickly.
Nova Forge additionally affords enterprises “reinforcement learning gyms." This allows them to train AI systems through their own environments with simulated scenarios to create smaller, faster models and access responsible AI toolkits. Once companies create their Novellas, they can bring them to Bedrock to build more applications and agents.
One customer currently using Nova Forge is Reddit, which integrated its own data and community-specific knowledge into a model to build a moderation program.
Nova Forge only works with Nova models, and AWS does not plan to bring in third-party open-source models hosted on Bedrock (for now).
Nova 2 models in detail
AWS said tens of thousands of companies now use its Nova models and the company expects the Nova 2 models to see the same adoption.
“Nova 2 Lite delivers incredible price performance for many workloads that we actually see our customers wanting to deliver in production,” Garman mentioned. “We think Nova 2 Lite will be the workhorse for many companies, while Pro will be for more complex tasks and for when you need your agents to be great.”
In a press launch, AWS mentioned evaluations confirmed Nova 2 Lite carried out “equal or better on 13 out of 15 benchmarks compared to Claude Haiku 4.5, equal or better on 11 out of 17 benchmarks compared to GPT-5 Mini and equal or better on 14 out of 18 benchmarks compared to Gemini Flash 2.5.”
Customers can alter how a lot Nova 2 Lite reveals its step-by-step pondering to stability prices with depth.
Nova Professional 2 additionally carried out effectively in benchmark testing in comparison with Claude Sonnet 4.5, GPT-5.1 and Gemini 2.5 Professional. This mannequin works greatest for multi-document evaluation, video reasoning, superior math and agentic engineering duties.
AWS mentioned in its press launch that each Nova 2 Lite and Professional “have built-in grounding and code execution capabilities.”
Nova 2 Sonic, the speech-to-speech mannequin, generates human-like conversations and now helps a number of languages. The up to date mannequin has a 1-million-token context window, with extra expressive voices and better accuracy. The corporate mentioned Sonic may even swap subjects mid-conversation.
Nova 2 Omni handles “up to 750,000 words, hours of audio, long videos and hundred-page documents, simultaneously analyzing entire product catalogs, testimonials, brand guidelines and video libraries at once.”
“While there are no comparable models in the industry to Nova 2 Omni, it demonstrates strengths in public benchmarks of multimodal reasoning on documents, images, videos and audio, and can generate high-quality images similar to other leading image-generation models,” AWS mentioned in its launch.
