Amazon releases AI agents it says can work for days at a time

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Amazon Web Services on Tuesday unveiled a host of new artificial intelligence tools and features designed to help companies nab more value from generative AI. Included is a new category of AI agents that can carry out tasks for hours or days without getting stuck and asking users for help, AWS said.

“This is what we’ve been hard at work on over the last year: how do you build this really robust brain that can do complicated work streams," AWS Chief Executive Matt Garman said in an interview. Agents are AI tools that work by taking some action on behalf of users. But in their current form, they often hit a wall and constantly need to come back to users for guidance.

Garman said the new “frontier agents," capable of performing tasks with broader goals for longer periods of time, are the product of what he called “an enormous amount" of software engineering and infrastructure data, a combination of different models and a strong underlying memory architecture. AWS also shared news on a service called Nova Forge, which lets enterprises train private instances of Amazon’s Nova models on their own proprietary data, and the general availability of its Trainium3 AI chip. AWS made the announcements at the company’s annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas.

Together, they highlight the cloud giant’s AI commitments amid concerns over the pace of enterprise AI adoption and the ability of hyperscalers to meet growing demand. AWS has sometimes been criticized as a laggard in the AI space since it was slower to release its own models. And while Garman agrees that AWS “took half a step back" at the beginning of the AI boom to focus on building a broad and scalable platform for enterprises, he said the