📰 Meet Nova Act: Amazon’s AI Agent That Automates Web Browsing
Amazon enters the AI agent race with a powerful web-navigating assistant.
Amazon AMZN 0.00%↑ has entered the AI agent race with a bold new product: Nova Act. Announced today, Nova Act is a general-purpose AI agent capable of controlling a web browser and executing tasks independently. While still in its research preview phase, this technology could have major implications for how we interact with the web and automate digital workflows.
What Is Nova Act?
Developed by Amazon's AGI lab in San Francisco, Nova Act is designed to navigate websites, fill out forms, and handle other simple online tasks. Alongside the AI agent itself, Amazon is launching the Nova Act SDK, a toolkit that allows developers to build their own AI-powered automation tools.
This move puts Amazon in direct competition with OpenAI’s Operator and Anthropic’s Computer Use, both designed to let AI systems act on behalf of users. But unlike its competitors, Amazon has a potential advantage: integration with Alexa+, the next-generation version of its popular voice assistant, now powered by generative AI.
What can Nova Act do?
According to Amazon, Nova Act will enable developers to create AI agents that can:
Automate online purchases – such as ordering meals or booking reservations.
Navigate and interact with websites – filling out forms, clicking buttons, and selecting dates on a calendar.
Process web-based tasks more efficiently – reducing the need for manual input from users.
Amazon claims Nova Act outperforms its competition in internal tests. On the ScreenSpot Web Text benchmark, which evaluates AI agents' ability to interact with on-screen text, Nova Act scored 94%, surpassing OpenAI’s CUA (88%) and Anthropic’s Claude 3.7 Sonnet (90%). However, the company has yet to benchmark its performance against industry-standard evaluations like WebVoyager.
The team behind Nova Act
This is the first major product to come out of Amazon’s AGI lab, an initiative led by former OpenAI researchers David Luan and Pieter Abbeel. Both have extensive experience in AI development: Luan founded Adept, and Abbeel co-founded Covariant, before joining Amazon to spearhead its AI agent efforts.
While some might question why an AGI lab is focusing on automating simple web tasks, Luan sees it as a necessary stepping stone toward more advanced AI. "An AI system that can reliably perform basic computer tasks is a crucial step toward true artificial general intelligence," he explained in a statement.
Can Amazon outperform Its rivals?
AI agents that can navigate the web and execute tasks autonomously are seen as a game-changing development, but existing models have struggled with reliability. Previous attempts by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic have been slow, error-prone, and limited in their ability to operate independently for long periods.
Amazon is betting that Nova Act will be different. With its integration into Alexa+ and access to Amazon's massive customer base, Nova Act has the potential to reach more users than competing AI agents. If Amazon can deliver on its promises, Nova Act could be a significant milestone in AI automation.
The coming months will show if Nova Act truly sets a new standard or if it faces the same challenges as its competitors.
Source: Amazon Blog, TechCrunch, SiliconAngle
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