Amazon on Monday unveiled Nova Act, a general-purpose AI agent that may take management of an internet browser and independently carry out some easy actions. Alongside the brand new agentic AI mannequin, Amazon is releasing the Nova Act SDK, a toolkit that permits builders to construct agent prototypes with Nova Act.
Nova Act, developed by Amazon’s recently opened San Francisco-based AGI lab, may even energy key options of the corporate’s upcoming Alexa+ upgrade, a generative AI-enhanced model of Amazon’s standard voice assistant. The model of Nova Act accessible beginning in the present day is rather less polished, nonetheless. Amazon is asking it a analysis preview.
Builders can entry the Nova Act toolkit on a brand new web site, nova.amazon.com, which additionally serves as a showcase for Amazon’s varied Nova basis fashions.
Nova Act is Amazon’s try and tackle OpenAI’s Operator and Anthropic’s Computer Use with general-purpose AI agent expertise of its personal. A number of main tech corporations consider AI brokers that may navigate the online for customers will make in the present day’s AI chatbots considerably extra helpful.
Amazon is probably not the primary to develop this form of agentic expertise, however by way of Alexa+, it may have the widest reach.
Amazon says builders constructing with the Nova Act SDK ought to be capable to automate primary actions on behalf of customers, equivalent to ordering salads from Sweetgreen or making dinner reservations. With the Nova Act toolkit, builders can pull collectively instruments that enable an AI agent to navigate internet pages, fill out varieties, or choose dates on a calendar.
Amazon claims that Nova Act outperforms brokers from OpenAI and Anthropic on a number of of the corporate’s inner checks. For instance, on ScreenSpot Net Textual content, which measures how an AI agent interacts with textual content on a display screen, Nova Act scored 94%, outperforming OpenAI’s CUA (which scored 88%) and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet (90%).
Nevertheless, Amazon didn’t benchmark Nova Act utilizing extra widespread agent evaluations, equivalent to WebVoyager.
Nova Act is the primary public product to emerge from Amazon’s aforementioned AGI lab, an initiative co-led by former OpenAI researchers David Luan and Pieter Abbeel. Each beforehand based startups of their very own — Luan began Adept, whereas Abbeel cofounded Covariant — earlier than Amazon employed them away final yr to spearhead its AI agent efforts.
Whereas it might appear unusual for an AGI lab to be constructing AI brokers that may order SweetGreen, Luan informed TechCrunch that he sees brokers as a key step towards creating superintelligent AI programs. Luan defines AGI as “an AI system that may enable you do something a human does on a pc.”
Luan says his staff designed the Nova Act SDK to reliably automate brief, easy duties, and provides builders instruments to exactly outline when they need a human to intervene in an agentic workflow. He hopes it can enable builders to create extra dependable agentic purposes, albeit not essentially totally autonomous ones.
Amazon is releasing its first generalist AI agent in a crowded area, nevertheless it’s an important expertise that the corporate has loads using on. Early checks of Nova Act may present a glimpse into a few of the capabilities of the long-delayed Alexa+, a make-or-break second for Amazon’s AI efforts.
A major problem with early AI agents from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic is their reliability throughout completely different domains. In TechCrunch’s checks, the programs are gradual, wrestle to function independently for very lengthy, and are liable to errors a human wouldn’t make. It received’t be lengthy till we see whether or not Amazon has cracked the code — or whether or not its brokers undergo from the identical flaws plaguing opponents.
Alexa,Amazon
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