It almost took less than 24 hours, as in just one day, Amazon moved to capitalize on OpenAI’s new relationship status with Microsoft. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) company launched a preview of OpenAI’s models on its Bedrock platform. The announcement came just hours after the ChatGPT maker ended its exclusive cloud arrangement with Microsoft, one of its oldest and biggest partnership.The companies reportedly described this as meeting years of customer demand. According to a report in Geekwire, AWS CEO Matt Garman said at an event in San Francisco, “Their production applications run in AWS. Their data is in AWS. They trust the security of AWS, and we’ve forced them for the last couple of years, to get great OpenAI models, to go to other places.” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman too joined the event via recorded video, said, “The opportunity ahead of us is enormous, and the most exciting part is that this is not something in the future — it’s starting right now.”Altman said that the collaboration with Amazon Web Services would involve co-developing a new platform for AI agents that can do computer-based work on people’s behalf.Amazon and OpenAI struck a $50 billion investment and cloud deal in February, with OpenAI committing to run workloads on Amazon’s custom Trainium chips and the two companies agreeing to co-build what they called a “Stateful Runtime Environment” on Amazon’s Bedrock platform. The cloud agreement alone is worth more than $100 billion over eight years.
Sam Altman hinted OpenAI going Amazon way in Cloud
On Monday (April 27), Microsoft announced that it will no longer pay a share of its revenue to ChatGPT maker OpenAI, the close partnership that can be credited to have helped unleash an artificial intelligence (AI) boom across the world. On its part, OpenAI said that it will continue to pay Microsoft a share of its revenue through 2030, though the rate will be capped. OpenAI has been on a race to boost sales of its AI technology by focusing on big business customers. Its chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, also spoke at the Amazon event.OpenAI relied exclusively on Microsoft’s investments in cloud computing services to build the technology that helped make ChatGPT a household name. Microsoft, in turn, relied on OpenAI’s technology to build its own AI assistant Copilot.Microsoft remains the primary cloud computing partner for OpenAI, and products made by the AI company will ship first on Microsoft’s cloud platform, called Azure, “unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities,” both companies said. Altman reportedly suggested in his remarks at the event that Amazon had those capabilities. “These systems need to run reliably and robustly,” Altman said. “They need to be secure, they need to scale, and they need to fit in the environments where companies already run their businesses. And they need infrastructure that customers already trust for their most important workloads. That’s what makes this partnership with AWS so important.”When OpenAI’s chief revenue officer told employees that Microsoft partnership held company backEarlier this month an internal memo written by OpenAI chief revenue officer Denise Dresser to employees said that Microsoft partnership had limited the company’s ability. “Our Microsoft partnership has been foundational to our success. But it has also limited our ability to meet enterprises where they are — for many that’s Bedrock,” Dresser wrote, referring to the AWS AI model platform. “Since we announced the partnership at the end of February, inbound demand from our customers for this offering has been frankly staggering.”The memo reportedly touted the Amazon Web Services alliance as a key enterprise growth driver for the ChatGPT maker.
