Close to two years after it revealed “Project Vesta,” an AI-enabled tool for automating simple web tasks, Amazon has unveiled Nova Act, a general-purpose AI agent. This unique tool has functionality to control a web browser and carry out basic actions on its own. Nova Act makes your digital work easier and faster by automating repetitive tasks. For instance, it will pre-order food from Sweetgreen or schedule dinner reservations for you.
Nova Act has bested agents from OpenAI and Anthropic in several internal trials. These amazing outcomes were performed by Amazon itself, truly a testament to Nova Act’s power and potential. It passed the ScreenSpot Web Text test with flying colors, scoring a 94% score for quality. This score outperformed OpenAI’s CUA, which scored 88%, and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet, which scored 90%. So much more to come. Though we’re thrilled by Nova Act’s exciting potential, please note that it is still a research preview and not a fully developed tool.
Developer Opportunities with Nova Act
This launch is the first tangible product that Amazon has released publicly from its AGI lab. David Luan and Pieter Abbeel, both former OpenAI researchers, co-lead this exciting initiative. Built on Amazon’s powerful Nova foundation models, Nova Act is a dynamic platform that brings world-class AI-driven automation into your operation. So now, developers are able to use the Nova Act toolkit. Using the Nova Act SDK, they’ll be able to develop prototypes of their agents on the newly launched website.
Unlike Nova Act, our IM toolkit is specifically designed to automate short, simple tasks reliably. It gives developers powerful, clear, and flexible tools to specify exactly where human action should be triggered within a more agentic workflow. The technology is set to power key features in Amazon’s upcoming Alexa+ upgrade, highlighting its significant role in Amazon’s AI strategy.
“an AI system that can help you do anything a human does on a computer.” – David Luan
Amazon’s Nova Act represents a crucial development in the company’s AI endeavors. With so much on the line, the success of Nova Act is critical to Amazon’s larger AI efforts. Moving forward, the technology will only get more sophisticated, but should always improve the user experience by taking care of the manual, repetitive tasks.
What The Author Thinks
Nova Act shows immense potential in streamlining everyday digital tasks, but it is still in the research phase. Amazon’s focus on improving user experience through AI-driven automation is promising, but the real challenge will be refining the technology for broader applications and ensuring its smooth integration into the market.
