Amazon Nova Wants to Be Your AI Stack
If you’re a developer who’s been playing musical chairs with foundation models, shelling out tokens to test capabilities across GPTs, Claude, Gemini, and more, Amazon has a new proposition: Stop hopping. Start building. Stay here.
With the launch of nova.amazon.com, Amazon is rolling out its next-gen foundation models under the Amazon Nova brand—and it's making a direct appeal to engineers, not just enterprises. From rapid prototyping to agentic workflows, this isn’t just a showcase. It’s a developer playground with production hooks.
Nova Act: Your Browser-Aware Agent API
At the center of the release is Amazon Nova Act, a new model trained to perform actions inside a web browser. This isn’t some future-agent concept. It’s real, it’s running, and it ships with an SDK.
Using Nova Act, devs can build agents that break down browser-based tasks into atomic operations: click, search, fill forms, check out. But it’s not just robotic automation, it’s smart. Developers can pass granular instructions (such as “skip the insurance upsell”) and even call external APIs mid-flow. This unlocks use cases way beyond scripting: automated shopping, research agents, digital assistants, all with robust reasoning and screen awareness.
"Nova Act represents a shift from 'chat with AI' to 'delegate to AI,'" said Rohit Prasad, SVP of Amazon Artificial General Intelligence, in a statement. "It’s built for people who want to ship, not just experiment."
The SDK is available now in research preview on nova.amazon.com. Expect early kinks, but also bleeding-edge capabilities.
A Full Stack of Frontier Models
Nova isn’t one model, it’s a lineup. The text side includes:
- Nova Micro: lightweight and blazing fast
- Nova Lite: balanced for cost and capability
- Nova Pro: frontier-level performance, optimized for enterprise scale
Whether you’re building a chatbot, automating internal workflows, or prototyping an RAG pipeline, Nova has a model that fits. And yes, it’s all integrated into Amazon Bedrock, so you can spin up endpoints, manage permissions, and scale with the rest of your AWS infra.
But Nova also leans into multimodal. Nova Canvas (for image generation) and Nova Reel (for video) bring high-quality content generation to the same platform—ideal for developers building creative tooling, marketing automations, or personalized media systems.
Why nova.amazon.com Matters
Nova.amazon.com isn’t just a brochure site. It’s where users:
- Run quick sessions with any Nova model
- Test prompts without writing a line of code
- Generate images or browse video samples
- Download the Nova Act SDK
- Transition seamlessly from prototype to production via Bedrock
For a company that usually buries its tech beneath layers of AWS console UI, the site feels... inviting. Click "New Session," pick a model, and start testing. Want to generate an image? One button. Need to integrate? SDKs and docs are right there.
The message is clear: You don’t need to be an AI research team to build with these tools. You just need a use case, and some curiosity.
The Strategic Play: AWS for AI Agents
Amazon isn’t shouting from the rooftops, but the plan is obvious. Nova is the front-end for a deeper strategy: become the default AI stack for developers who don’t want to choose between dozens of siloed model APIs.
By integrating Nova into Bedrock, tying in Alexa+, Rufus, Amazon Q, and giving devs agentic capabilities with Nova Act, Amazon is aiming, quietly, to build the rails for a future where AI agents are ubiquitous, and AWS is their home.
Posted by John K. Waters on March 31, 2025