With Nova Forge, AWS Makes Building Custom AI Models Easy

Las Vegas — At this annual re:Invent conference, AWS today launched new versions of its Nova models that are comparable with the latest model releases from frontier labs like Anthropic, OpenAI and Google. But for many use cases, off-the-shelf large language models (LLM) don’t solve their specific use cases and may not be able to deliver the reliability needed to put a given AI workload into production. Fine-tuning existing open-weight models is often the only option here, but that takes a lot of expertise and can come with its own pitfalls (like model regressions). For these companies, AWS today launched Nova Forge, a new service that allows businesses to bring their own data to AWS’s own Nova models, starting with Nova 2 Lite (it won’t work with any other models). They will have to pay $100,000 per year for the privilege, though. AWS calls this idea “open training,” though it’s worth noting that the Nova models are not open-weight or open source models. Image credit: AWS. Nova Forge gives users access to pre-, mid-, and post-trained Nova models and lets them mix in their proprietary data and Amazon-curated datasets at each of these stages. Ideally, this means that the model will retain all of its existing knowledge, but now also has a better understanding of a given organisation’s specific needs and knowledge base. That’s useful, especially for use cases where the knowledge base doesn’t change frequently, in which case, a more traditional RAG architecture would likely make more sense. If anything, though, these new custom models (AWS calls them”novellas”) will provide even RAG-based systems with a more customised basis to start from. Using reinforcement learning (RL), users can then also fine-tune the models’ responses even further. Users will also have the option to create smaller, distilled models that will be more cost-effective to run, and all of this is backed by AWS’s responsible AI toolkit that helps businesses ensure the models have the necessary safety controls in place. AWS Nova Forge (Credit: AWS). “Working with Nova Forge is allowing us to improve content moderation on Reddit with a more unified system that’s already delivering impressive results,” said Chris Slowe, the CTO of Reddit. “We’re replacing a number of different models with a single, more accurate solution that makes moderation more efficient. The ability to replace multiple specialised ML workflows with one cohesive approach marks a shift in how we implement and scale AI across Reddit. After seeing these early successes in our safety efforts, we’re eager to explore how Nova Forge might help in other areas of our business.” As of now, the only place to deploy these models is Amazon Bedrock, though. It doesn’t look like they’ll be able to take them out of these environments and run them elsewhere. AWS, of course, argues that this ensurs security, scalability and data privacy, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, over time, the company would allow Forge users to take their models elsewhere as well. The post With Nova Forge, AWS Makes Building Custom AI Models Easy appeared first on The New Stack.