Amazon is building its own AI model that incorporates advanced "reasoning" capabilities, Business Insider has learned.
The offering is tentatively scheduled to launch by June under the Nova brand, a group of generative AI models Amazon unveiled late last year, according to a person directly involved in the project. This person asked not to be identified because they were not authorized to speak with the media.
Amazon wants the new model to take a "hybrid reasoning" approach that provides quick answers and more complex extended thinking within a single system, this person added. An Amazon spokesperson didn't respond to a request for comment.
Reasoning models have recently become the next frontier in AI. They often work more slowly but can also tackle tougher problems by trying multiple solutions and backtracking via chain-of-thought techniques. Companies including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic have released their own reasoning models recently, while DeepSeek drew a lot of attention for building a similar offering more efficiently.
One of Amazon's priorities is to make its Nova reasoning model more price-efficient than competitors, which include OpenAI's o1, Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet, and Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, according to the person involved in the project.
Amazon previously said that its existing in-house Nova models are at least 75% cheaper than third-party models available via its Bedrock AI development platform.
Another goal is to get it Amazon's upcoming reasoning model ranked in the top 5 for performance, based on external benchmarks that evaluate software development and math skills, such as the SWE, Berkeley Function Calling Leaderboard, and AIME, among others, this person added.
The move reflects Amazon's commitment to invest in its own family of AI models, even as it preaches the need to offer a variety of model choices through Bedrock. Amazon's AGI team, run by head scientist Rohit Prasad, has been working on this new model.
It also puts Amazon in more direct competition with Anthropic, the AI startup that just launched its newest model. Claude 3.7 Sonnet uses a similar hybrid approach, combining quick answers and longer chain-of-thought outputs.
Amazon has invested $8 billion in Anthropic so far, and the two companies have been close partners, collaborating in areas including AI chips and cloud computing.
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