[HN Gopher] Amazon Nova
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       Amazon Nova
        
       Author : scbenet
       Score  : 215 points
       Date   : 2024-12-03 18:04 UTC (4 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (aws.amazon.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (aws.amazon.com)
        
       | scbenet wrote:
       | Technical report is available here
       | https://www.amazon.science/publications/the-amazon-nova-fami...
        
         | kajecounterhack wrote:
         | TL;DR comparison of models vs frontier models on public
         | benchmarks here https://imgur.com/a/CKMIhmm
        
           | brokensegue wrote:
           | So looks like they are trying to win on speed over raw metric
           | performance
        
             | azinman2 wrote:
             | Either that, or that's just where they landed.
        
           | SparkyMcUnicorn wrote:
           | This doesn't include all the benchmarks.
           | 
           | The one that really stands out is GroundUI-1K, where it beats
           | the competition by 46%.
           | 
           | Nova Pro looks like it could be a SOTA-comparable model at a
           | lower price point.
        
             | oblio wrote:
             | SOTA?
        
       | baxtr wrote:
       | As a side comment: the sound quality of the auto generated voice
       | clip is really poor.
       | 
       | No match for Google's NotebookLM podcasts.
        
         | wenc wrote:
         | The autogenerated voice is Amazon Polly which is an old AWS
         | speech synthesis service which doesn't use the latest
         | technology.
         | 
         | It's irrelevant to the article, which is about Nova.
        
         | griomnib wrote:
         | If you haven't seen it this may be the best use of ai-podcast
         | I've seen: https://youtu.be/gfr4BP4V1R8
        
           | bongodongobob wrote:
           | This is goddamn hilarious, thank you.
        
       | xnx wrote:
       | More options/competition is good. When will we see it on
       | https://lmarena.ai/ ?
        
       | teilo wrote:
       | So that's what I missed at the keynote.
        
       | htrp wrote:
       | No parameter counts?
        
       | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
       | Since Amazon are building their own frontier models, what's the
       | point of their relationship with Anthropic ?
        
         | tokioyoyo wrote:
         | If you play all sides, you'll always come on top.
        
           | worldsayshi wrote:
           | Yeah Copilot includes Claude now.
        
         | tinyhouse wrote:
         | I can only guess.
         | 
         | 1. A company the size of Amazon has enough resources and unique
         | internal data no one else has access to that it makes sense for
         | them to build their own models. Even if it's only for internal
         | use
         | 
         | 2. Amazon cannot beat Anthropic at this game. They are far a
         | head of them in terms of performance and adoption. Building
         | these models in-house doesn't mean it's a bad idea to also
         | invest in Anthropic
        
           | PartiallyTyped wrote:
           | Also not putting all of your eggs in one basket.
        
         | blackeyeblitzar wrote:
         | Commoditizing complements
        
         | jonathaneunice wrote:
         | Different models have different strengths and weaknesses,
         | especially here in the early days when models and their
         | capabilities progress several times per year. The apps,
         | programs, and systems based on models need to know how to
         | exploit their specific strengths and weaknesses. So they are
         | not infinitely interchangeable. Over time some of that
         | differentiation will erode, but it will probably take years.
         | 
         | AWS having customers using its own model probably improves
         | AWS's margins, but having multiple models available (e.g.
         | Anthropic's) improves their ability to capture market share. To
         | date, AWS's efforts (e.g. Q, CodeWhisperer) have not met with
         | universal praise. So for at least for the present, it makes
         | sense to bring customers to AWS to "do AI" whether they're
         | using AWS's models or someone else's.
        
         | Muskyinhere wrote:
         | Customers want choices. They just sell all models.
        
         | qgin wrote:
         | Not sure if this was the goal, but it does work well from a
         | product perspective that Nova is a super-cheap model that is
         | comparable to everything BUT Claude.
        
       | andrewstuart wrote:
       | It's not clear what the use cases are for this, who is it aimed
       | at.
        
         | dvh wrote:
         | Shareholders?
        
           | christhecaribou wrote:
           | The real "customers".
        
         | mystcb wrote:
         | I'd say, people that need it. Which could be the same for all
         | the other models out there.
         | 
         | To create one model that is great at everything is probably a
         | pipedream. Much like creating a multi-tool that can do
         | everything- but can it? I wouldn't trust a multi-tool to take a
         | wheel nut off a wheel, but I would find it useful if I suddenly
         | needed a cross-head screw taken out of something.
         | 
         | But then I also have a specific crosshead screwdriver that is
         | good at just taking out cross-head screws.
         | 
         | Use the right tool for the right reason. In this case, there
         | maybe a legal reason why someone might need to use it. It might
         | be that this version of a model can create something better
         | that another model can't. It might be that for cost reasons you
         | are within AWS, that it makes sense to use a model at the
         | cheaper cost than say something else.
         | 
         | So yeah, I am sure it will be great for some people, and
         | terrible for others... just the way things go!
        
           | dgfitz wrote:
           | > I'd say, people that need it.
           | 
           | Nobody needs Reddit hallucinations about programming.
        
         | petesergeant wrote:
         | https://artificialanalysis.ai/leaderboards/models seems to
         | suggest Nova Lite is half the price of 4o-mini, and a chunk
         | faster too, with a bit of quality drop-off. I have no loyalty
         | to OpenAI, if it does as well as 4o-mini in the eval suite,
         | I'll switch. I was hoping "Gemini 1.5 Flash (Sep)" would pass
         | muster for similar reasons, but it didn't.
        
       | xendo wrote:
       | Some independent latency and quality evaluations already
       | available at https://artificialanalysis.ai/ Looks to be cheap and
       | fast.
        
       | blackeyeblitzar wrote:
       | It would be nice if this was a truly open source model like OLMo:
       | https://venturebeat.com/ai/truly-open-source-llm-from-ai2-to...
        
         | sourcepluck wrote:
         | Is it narrowly open source, or somewhat open source, in some
         | way? Thanks for that link, anyway!
        
       | mikesurowiec wrote:
       | A rough idea of the price differences...                 Per 1k
       | tokens        Input   |  Output       Amazon Nova Micro:
       | $0.000035 | $0.00014       Amazon Nova Lite:  $0.00006  |
       | $0.00024       Amazon Nova Pro:   $0.0008   | $0.0032
       | Claude 3.5 Sonnet: $0.003    | $0.015       Claude 3.5 Haiku:
       | $0.0008   | $0.0004       Claude 3 Opus:     $0.015    | $0.075
       | 
       | Source: AWS Bedrock Pricing
       | https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/pricing/
        
         | Bilal_io wrote:
         | You have added another zero for Haiku, its output cost is
         | $0.004
        
           | indigodaddy wrote:
           | Thanks that had confused me when I compared same to Nova Pro
        
         | warkdarrior wrote:
         | Eyeballing it, Nova seems to be 1.5 order of magnitude cheaper
         | than Claude, at all model sizes.
        
         | holub008 wrote:
         | Has anyone found TPM/RPM limits on Nova? Either they aren't
         | limited, or the quotas haven't been published yet:
         | https://docs.aws.amazon.com/general/latest/gr/bedrock.html#l...
        
           | tmpz22 wrote:
           | Maybe they want to gauge demand for a bit first?
        
         | Tepix wrote:
         | I suggest you give the price per million token as seems to be
         | the standard.
        
           | oblio wrote:
           | I'm guessing they just copy pasted from the official docs
           | page.
        
       | indigodaddy wrote:
       | Unfortunate that this seems to be inextricably tied to Amazon
       | Bedrock though in order to use it..
        
       | jklinger410 wrote:
       | It's really amusing how bad Amazon is at writing and designing
       | UI. For a company of their size and scope it's practically
       | unforgivable. But they always get away with it.
        
         | smt88 wrote:
         | You say they "get away with it," but it makes more sense to
         | conclude that UI design has a lot lower ROI than we assume it
         | does as users.
        
           | wilg wrote:
           | Or that design instincts are backwards
        
           | wavemode wrote:
           | You can't conclude that.
           | 
           | At best, you can conclude that outdated product design
           | doesn't always ruin a business (clearly). But you can't
           | conclude the inverse (that investing in modern product design
           | doesn't ever help a business).
        
             | handfuloflight wrote:
             | That's a great point. Further, there are many sizeable
             | businesses built on top of AWS where they deliver the
             | abstractions with compression that earns them their margin.
             | 
             | Case in point: tell me, from the point of view of the user,
             | how many steps it takes to deploy a NextJS/React ecosystem
             | website with Vercel and with AWS, start to finish.
        
             | rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote:
             | I think they have plenty of competition in the cloud
             | computing space. It seems fair to say that their strategy
             | of de-prioritizing UI/UX in favor of getting features out
             | the door more quickly and cheaply has benefitted them.
             | 
             | However, I don't think it's fair to say that this trade-off
             | always wins out. Rather, they've carved out their own
             | ecological niche and, for now, they're exploiting it well.
        
           | nekoashide wrote:
           | Oh I'm sure, the ACM UI was impossible to use for years to
           | find certificates, they improved it, but, it will never have
           | the same level of functionality that the API gives you and
           | that's the bread and butter.
        
         | Bilal_io wrote:
         | That happens when you ask SWE to design. To fix this, Amazon
         | will need to do extensive UX research and incrementally make
         | changes until the UI doesn't look the same and is more usable.
         | Because users hate sudden change.
        
         | MudAndGears wrote:
         | Everyone I know who's worked at Amazon says Jeff Bezos has his
         | hand in everything to the detriment of product design.
         | 
         | I've heard multiple accounts of him seeing a WIP and asking for
         | changes that compromise the product's MVP.
        
           | queuebert wrote:
           | Is this why the everything besides the front page still looks
           | like someone's first website from 1998?
        
           | genghisjahn wrote:
           | "Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages
           | every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry
           | Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most
           | famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the
           | entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said
           | for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the
           | company."
           | 
           | https://gist.github.com/kislayverma/d48b84db1ac5d737715e8319.
           | ..
           | 
           | I read that post every couple of years or so.
        
             | foundry27 wrote:
             | Why was this being downvoted? It's first-party evidence
             | that substantiates the claims of the parent comment, and
             | adds interesting historical context from major industry
             | players
        
         | acdha wrote:
         | What do you think is comparable but better? I think you're
         | really seeing that they have a large organization with a lot of
         | people working on different complex products, which makes major
         | changes much harder to coordinate, and their market skews
         | technical and prioritizes functionality higher than design so
         | there isn't a huge amount of pressure.
        
         | jgalt212 wrote:
         | It's similarly amazing how long the YouTube home page takes to
         | load, but it's a top 5 destination no matter how bad its
         | Lighthouse Score is.
        
         | outworlder wrote:
         | > It's really amusing how bad Amazon is at writing and
         | designing UI.
         | 
         | For most of AWS offerings, it literally doesn't matter and
         | logging in to AWS Console is a break glass thing.
         | 
         | Case in point: this very article. It uses boto3 to interface
         | with AWS.
        
           | trallnag wrote:
           | At the same time, AWS has tons of services that are
           | explicitly designed for usage through the console. For
           | example, many features of CloudWatch
        
             | oblio wrote:
             | Those are probably implemented by interns.
        
       | zapnuk wrote:
       | They missed a big opportunity by not offering eu-hosted versions.
       | 
       | Thats a big thing for complience. All LLM-providers reserve the
       | right to save (up to 30days) and inspect/check prompts for their
       | own complience.
       | 
       | However, this means that company data is potentionally sotred
       | out-of-cloud. This is already problematic, even more so when the
       | storage location is outside the EU.
        
         | Tepix wrote:
         | I'm not sure if hosting it in the EU will do any good for
         | Amazon, there's still the US CLOUD Act: It doesn't really
         | matter where the data is located.
        
       | diggan wrote:
       | > The model processes inputs up to 300K tokens in length [...] up
       | to 30 minutes of video in a single request.
       | 
       | I wonder how fast it "glances" an entire 30 minute video and
       | takes until the first returned token. Anyone wager a guess?
        
       | potlee wrote:
       | > The Nova family of models were trained on Amazon's custom
       | Trainium1 (TRN1) chips,10 NVidia A100 (P4d instances), and H100
       | (P5 instances) accelerators. Working with AWS SageMaker, we stood
       | up NVidia GPU and TRN1 clusters and ran parallel trainings to
       | ensure model performance parity
       | 
       | Does this mean they trained multiple copies of the models?
        
       | jmward01 wrote:
       | No audio support: The models are currently trained to process and
       | understand video content solely based on the visual information
       | in the video. They do not possess the capability to analyze or
       | comprehend any audio components that are present in the video.
       | 
       | This is blowing my mind. gemini-1.5-flash accidentally knows how
       | to transcribe amazingly well but it is -very- hard to figure out
       | how to use it well and now Amazon comes out with a gemini flash
       | like model and it explicitly ignores audio. It is so clear that
       | multi-modal audio would be easy for these models but it is like
       | they are purposefully holding back releasing it/supporting it.
       | This has to be a strategic decision to not attach audio. Probably
       | because the margins on ASR are too high to strip with a cheap
       | LLM. I can only hope Meta will drop a mult-modal audio model to
       | force this soon.
        
         | xendo wrote:
         | They also announced speech to speech and any to any models for
         | early next year. I think you are underestimating the effort
         | required to release 5 competitive models at the same time.
        
       | adt wrote:
       | Param estimates etc:
       | 
       | https://lifearchitect.ai/olympus/
        
       | zacharycohn wrote:
       | I really wish they would left-justify instead of center-justify
       | the pricing information so I'm not sitting here counting zeroes
       | and trying to figure out how they all line up.
        
       | Super_Jambo wrote:
       | No embedding endpoints?
        
       | lukev wrote:
       | This is a digression, but I really wish Amazon would be more
       | normal in their product descriptions.
       | 
       | Amazon is rapidly developing its own jargon such that you need to
       | understand how Amazon talks about things (and its existing
       | product lineup) before you can understand half of what they're
       | saying about a new thing. The way they describe their products
       | seems almost designed to obfuscate what they _really_ do.
       | 
       | Every time they introduce something new, you have to click
       | through several pages of announcements and docs just to ascertain
       | what something _actually is_ (an API, a new type of compute
       | platform, a managed SaaS product?)
        
         | Miraste wrote:
         | That may be generally true, but the linked page says Nova is a
         | series of foundation models in the first sentence.
        
           | lukev wrote:
           | Yeah but even then they won't describe it using the same sort
           | of language that everyone else developing these things does.
           | How many parameters? What kind of corpus was it trained on?
           | MoE, single model, or something else? Will the weights be
           | available?
           | 
           | It doesn't even use the words "LLM", "multimodal" or
           | "transformer" which are clearly the most relevant terms
           | here... "foundation model" isn't wrong but it's also the most
           | abstract way to describe it.
        
         | kvakvs wrote:
         | Amazontalk: We will save you costs Human language: We will make
         | profit while you think you're saving the costs
         | 
         | Amazontalk: You can build on <product name> to analyze complex
         | documents... Human language: There is no product, just some DIY
         | tools.
         | 
         | Amazontalk: Provides the intelligence and flexibility Human
         | language: We will charge your credit card in multiple obscure
         | ways, and we'll be smart about it
        
         | oblio wrote:
         | Once upon a time there were (and still are) mainframes (and SAP
         | is similar in this respect). These insular systems came with
         | their own tools, their own ecosystem, their own terminology,
         | their own certifications, etc. And you could rent compute & co
         | on them.
         | 
         | If you think of clouds as being cross continent mainframes, a
         | lot more things make a more sense.
        
       | TheAceOfHearts wrote:
       | They really should've tried to generate better video examples,
       | those two videos that they show don't seem that impressive when
       | you consider the amount of resources available to AWS. Like what
       | even is the point of this? It's just generating more filler
       | content without any substance. Maybe we'll reach the point where
       | video generation gets outrageously good and I'll be proven wrong,
       | but right now it seems really disappointing.
       | 
       | Right now when I see obviously AI generated images for book
       | covers I take that as a signal of low quality. If AI generated
       | videos continue to look this bad I think that'll also be a clear
       | signal of low quality products.
        
       | ndr_ wrote:
       | Setting up AWS so you can try it via Amazon Bedrock API is a
       | hassle, so I made a step-by-step guide:
       | https://ndurner.github.io/amazon-nova. It's 14+ steps!
        
         | simonw wrote:
         | Thank you!
        
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