Amazon just dropped a game-changer that could reshape enterprise AI. The company unveiled Nova Forge, a new tool that lets customers build their own frontier AI models by plugging into Amazon's base model training process - something previously reserved for tech giants. This isn't just another fine-tuning service; it's custom pre-training that could give businesses the specialized AI they've been waiting for.
Amazon is making its biggest AI play yet, and it's not what you'd expect. While everyone's been focused on who has the smartest chatbot, Amazon's betting on something potentially more valuable: letting customers build their own frontier models.
The company announced Nova Forge alongside its second-generation Nova AI models at re:Invent in Las Vegas. But here's what's really interesting - Nova Forge doesn't just let you fine-tune existing models like everyone else. It gives customers access to custom pre-training, the foundational stage where base models are built. That's territory normally reserved for companies like OpenAI and Google.
"Everyone is looking for a frontier model that's an expert in their domain," Rohit Prasad, who leads Amazon's AI efforts, told WIRED. "This is essentially a new open training paradigm."
The proof is already in the pudding. Reddit used Nova Forge to create a custom model specifically designed to identify rule-breaking content. Traditional fine-tuning wouldn't work because most AI models are built to avoid offensive content entirely - they'd refuse to analyze the very materials Reddit needs to moderate.
"Other LLMs understand Reddit as a concept, and how Reddit works, but they're not down in the weeds," Reddit CTO Chris Slowe explained to WIRED. "We really built a Reddit expert model."
This hits at a massive enterprise problem. According to Bain's November survey, about three-quarters of US companies see AI as a high priority, but they're struggling with a lack of expertise and resources to build truly useful custom models.
The AI model landscape has traditionally been binary: closed models you access through APIs, or open models you download and run yourself. Nova Forge creates a third path - what Amazon calls "mid-stage training access" that's locked into AWS infrastructure but gives unprecedented customization power.
Amazon's timing here is strategic. While and battle over general-purpose model supremacy, Amazon's going after the enterprise market that wants specialized AI but lacks the hundreds of millions needed to train models from scratch. Prasad says Nova Forge models should be "significantly cheaper" than building from scratch, though Amazon isn't sharing specifics yet.
