6 releases covered on ThursdAI · aws.amazon.com ↗
AWS brings GPT-5.5 and Codex to Bedrock as Azure exclusivity ends
AWS announced GPT-5.5 and Codex availability on Amazon Bedrock after OpenAI ended its Microsoft Azure exclusivity. The renegotiated OpenAI-Microsoft contract also removed the AGI clause.
Amazon brings Alexa+ to the browser as a $20/month web chat
Amazon made Alexa Plus, its upgraded smart assistant, available as a web chat interface for $20/month. It supports free-flowing conversations without repeating the wake word, integrates with smart home devices via natural language, and can continue conversations across devices; voice on the web is coming later.
Amazon announces Nova 2 family: Lite, Pro, Sonic, and Omni
Amazon rolled out the Nova 2 model suite spanning text, speech, and multimodal stacks with Lite, Pro, Sonic, and Omni variants. The launch came with major benchmark jumps over the first Nova generation and includes a fast, cost-effective reasoning model in Nova 2 Lite.
AWS announces multi-year strategic infrastructure partnership with OpenAI
AWS announced a multi-year strategic infrastructure partnership with OpenAI to power ChatGPT inference, training, and agentic AI workloads. It is another sign of OpenAI spreading its compute needs across every major cloud provider, and a notable win for AWS in the frontier-AI infrastructure race.
Amazon unveils Nova Sonic, a speech-to-speech foundation model
Amazon announced Nova Sonic, a foundational speech-to-speech model that unifies speech understanding and generation for real-time, natural-sounding voice conversations. It is available through Amazon Bedrock as part of the Nova family.
Amazon announces Nova Act browser agent SDK
Amazon entered the agent race with Nova Act, an agent designed to take actions in web browsers, possibly built with talent from the Adept acquisition. Amazon claims it beats Claude 3.5 and OpenAI's computer-use model on some benchmarks, but it is only available via an SDK behind a request form, so claims could not be verified hands-on.
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