At its re:Invent conference in Las Vegas Amazon announced a new family of artificial intelligence models and a service called Nova Forge, designed to let customers build their own specialized AI. The announcement signals a new approach to making advanced AI more useful for specific business needs.
The offering allows companies to add their own proprietary data during the early stages of an AI model’s creation, a process known as custom pre-training. This differs from the more common method of fine-tuning, which modifies a model that is already fully trained. According to Amazon, this “open training paradigm” allows for the creation of models that are experts in a specific domain. The resulting custom models are called “Novellas.”
One of the first customers to test the service was Reddit. The company’s chief technology officer, Chris Slowe, explained that standard models often fail at content moderation because they are designed to avoid the very offensive material they need to analyze. By using Nova Forge, Reddit was able to build what Slowe called a “Reddit expert model” capable of understanding the platform’s unique content. Other companies testing the service include Booking.com, Sony, and Nimbus Therapeutics.
Alongside this new service, Amazon introduced the second generation of its Nova AI models.
- Nova 2 Lite and Nova 2 Pro: These are large language models for a range of tasks, from everyday functions to complex problem-solving.
- Nova 2 Sonic: A speech-to-speech model designed for generating human-like conversations.
- Nova 2 Omni: A multimodal model that can process text, images, audio, and video to perform reasoning tasks.
Amazon claims its new models are competitive with leading models from rivals like OpenAI and Google. The company states that Nova 2 Pro matches or exceeds the performance of models like GPT-5.1 and Gemini 3.0 Pro on several benchmarks. It also highlighted that its smaller Nova 2 Lite model performs comparably to models like GPT-5 Mini and Claude 4.5 Haiku.
While Nova Forge offers a new path for businesses to develop custom AI, it is currently limited to working with Amazon’s Nova 2 Lite model. Amazon has not announced plans to extend the service to third-party models available on its cloud platform.
Sources: Wired, VentureBeat
Photo: AWS
