During the annual AWS re:Invent keynote, CEO Matt Garman unveils several AI innovations.
The most notable announcement is Amazon Nova Forge, a new platform that gives companies access to checkpoints of Amazon’s Nova models. These can then be further trained with their own proprietary data.
Garman describes it as “a new service that introduces the concept of open training models”. Companies can now not only customize but truly co-train to build a model that fully understands their domain knowledge. These models are called Amazon Novellas
AWS emphasizes that this is crucial for companies that want more than RAG or fine-tuning: “Almost every customer I talk to wants the model to truly understand their data.”
Nova 2
AWS is also expanding its foundation models with Nova 2, a series of models designed for high intelligence, low latency, and optimal cost:
Nova 2 Lite is a cost-efficient powerful model for production workloads. AWS claims that the model does not fall short of comparable models in the industry in terms of following instructions, invoking tools, and code generation.
Nova 2 Pro, on the other hand, is intended for the heaviest reasoning tasks. According to Garman, “Nova 2 Pro outperforms GPT-5.1, Gemini 3 Pro, and Claude 4.5 on benchmarks for following instructions and using AI agents.” Nova 2 Sonic is speech-to-speech AI with extensive language support, and Nova 2 Ami is a multimodal reasoning and generation model that can understand text, image, video, and sound. It can also generate both text and images. AWS calls it “the first reasoning model that supports all these functions simultaneously.”
Bedrock Agent Core
According to Garman, Bedrock Agent Core is gaining popularity. It’s the platform that allows companies to build advanced AI agents. Garman emphasizes that the rise of AI agents marks a turning point: “I think AI agents have brought us to a new turning point… this will have as much impact as the internet or cloud.”
With Nova Forge, Novellas, and Agent Core, an ecosystem emerges where organizations can not only deploy AI but build AI that works the way their business works. Sony illustrates this in the keynote: it uses Nova Forge to create a business model that makes their document and compliance processes “100 times more efficient”.