AWS Nova Grounding - The good and the bad…

Want your AI tools to have the ability to search the internet to double-check that the information it is giving you is accurate and up to date?

Then you may want to check out Nova Grounding… or possibly not. Let me explain. ​ AWS Nova Ground is a tool you can add when you make your API call. You don’t need to define it; passing in the arguments for it just makes the tool available to the model server side. So the model can choose to search the internet if it wants to.

​ Now here is what I said, “or possibly not”. When I asked it for the current price of the S&P 500, it was off by a huge amount. When I asked it about the top stories in the news, it was close but seemed to be missing the top stories.

It did cite its sources, but the numbers on the sources did NOT match the numbers it gave me. So either it doesn’t have access to the latest information, like it's using cached data, or it is struggling to interpret what it is getting back from the web search.

​ Either way, something is off, and I would hesitate to use it in production at this point. I did try to get it to tell me what Nova Ground is using under the hood as a search engine, but it was reluctant to do so.

​A couple of things to note:

First, it only works with Nova Premier right now, so you have to pay for a beefier model if you want to use it. They did say they had plans to allow other models to use it in the future.

Second they did say in their announcement post “Web Grounding incurs additional cost” but the only thing I could find on their pricing page is this “The text tokens input and output pricing applies to specific use cases such as speech-to-text transcription, tool calls for task completion or knowledge grounding, adding conversation history to the session etc” which isn’t very clear.

Amusingly, when I asked the Nova Premier model to use Nova Ground to find the price of Nova Ground, this is the response I got:

"Nova Grounding isn't a commercial product or financial asset that has a market price.”

Again, I would consider other RAG options before going to production with Nova Grounding at this time.

​ Question for you: What does your RAG use case and setup look like? Any technologies that should be on my radar?