Amazon expands Bedrock with new AI model marketplace, a day after unveiling its own ‘Nova’

LAS VEGAS — Unveiling Amazon’s homegrown Nova artificial intelligence models yesterday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made a point of saying the company was still committed to offering a broad choice of models beyond its own.

This morning at the Amazon Web Services re:Invent conference, the company doubled down on that commitment, adding new AI models from Luma AI and Poolside to the core Amazon Bedrock generative AI managed service.

Amazon announced a new Bedrock Marketplace that it says will provide customers with access to specialized foundation models from leading providers, in addition to the models already available in Bedrock. Examples include models for specialized use cases such as biology and unique business applications.

The goal is to “streamline your development workflows by discovering and testing these emerging and specialized models through a unified experience,” explained Swami Sivasubramanian, Amazon VP of AI and Data, addressing the crowd during a re:Invent keynote Wednesday morning.

Amazon said more than 100 models will be available through the marketplace.

Bedrock is a key part of Amazon’s broader AI strategy, competing against services such as HuggingFace and Google’s Vertex AI. Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and other major cloud platforms are looking to AI to fuel their growth, offering a variety of new AI services and tools that tie into their core cloud services.

Amazon’s Nova will be available initially in Bedrock alongside third-party models in six forms, ranging from a “micro” text-only model to a high-end model for video generation. Jassy, the former AWS CEO, explained yesterday that Amazon developed the new models for internal use before deciding to share them publicly.

Opening the annual conference on Monday morning, AWS CEO Matt Garman said AI inference is emerging as a fourth building block for AWS customers, alongside compute, storage, and database services.