Amazon (AMZN-1.42%) introduced a new artificial intelligence model on Monday that can do basic things on a user’s behalf inside a web browser.
In a demo video, Amazon showed Nova Act searching for apartments on a website and sorting them by biking distance to a train station. The company released the tool as a research preview, and said U.S.-based developers can start using it to build so-called AI agents — or AI software that attempts to complete tasks autonomously — starting today.
Amazon called its Nova Act software development kit “a crucial step forward toward building reliable agents by enabling developers to break down complex workflows into atomic commands (e.g., search, checkout, answer questions about the screen).” The company first debuted its Nova foundation models in December during its re:Invent web services event for developers.
Amazon is the latest tech giant to launch early-stage agentic — or independent, task-performing — AI tools, however this kind of software isn’t quite ready to do much without supervision today.
In January, OpenAI launched a research preview of its AI agent called Operator, which it also said can perform tasks on the web on behalf of users. Operator uses its own browser, and can interact with a webpage by typing, clicking, and scrolling, OpenAI said. Users can have Operator do tasks such as completing online forms and grocery shopping, according to the company.
OpenAI launched another AI agent in February called Deep Research, which can “synthesize large amounts of online information” with its reasoning capabilities, as well as complete multi-step research. Google (GOOGL+0.28%) also offers an identically named research tool.
On Amazon’s fourth-quarter earnings call in February, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy said the company spent $26.3 billion in capital expenditures in the fourth quarter — a “vast majority” of which was on AI for Amazon Web Services. Jassy added that the spending “is reasonably representative of what you could expect in annualized capex rate in 2025,” which would be around $100 billion.
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