OpenAI models live in Amazon Bedrock, one day after Microsoft’s end – GeekWire
SAN FRANCISCO – Amazon moved quickly on Tuesday to take advantage of the new OpenAI relationship with Microsoft, presenting a preview of OpenAI models at its Bedrock site less than 24 hours after the ChatGPT maker released its exclusive cloud system.
The companies described the news as meeting years of customer demand.
“Their production applications run on AWS. Their data is on AWS. They trust the security of AWS, and we have forced them for the past few years, to get good OpenAI models, to go to other places,” said AWS CEO Matt Garman at an event in San Francisco.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman appeared at the event in a video recording, noting that his “program was taken off” that day, apparently referring to the opening of the lawsuit against Elon Musk against him and OpenAI in nearby Oakland.
“The opportunity in front of us is huge, and what’s really exciting is that this isn’t something for the future — it’s starting right now,” Altman said in the video.
Altman also said that Codex’s OpenAI tool Codex will be available to AWS customers, and the companies unveiled Amazon Bedrock Managed Agents, powered by OpenAI – the brand name for the enterprise agent platform that was previously described as “Robust Runway” when the two companies announced their partnership in February.
Denise Dresser, chief revenue officer at OpenAI, said hundreds of business customers she’s met since joining the company four months ago have gone through the AI testing phase.
“They understand that in order to do that, they need to have strong models. But more importantly, they want those models in a trusted environment that they know and a trusted infrastructure. So to me, that’s what’s so special about this relationship,” said Drescer.
It’s been a whirlwind two months for both companies.
Amazon and OpenAI reached a $50 billion investment and cloud deal in February, with OpenAI committing to run workloads on Amazon’s Trainium chips and the two companies agreeing to build what they call a “Hard Runway” on the Amazon Bedrock site. The cloud deal alone is worth more than $100 billion over eight years.
An internal OpenAI memo from April highlighted the Amazon partnership as a key driver of business growth. OpenAI’s chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, wrote that the Microsoft partnership has “reduced our ability to meet businesses where they are,” adding that internal demand for AWS’s offering has been “absolutely phenomenal.”
Amazon also doubled down on its first AI partner, Anthropic, investing up to $25 billion and hitting a similar $100 billion cloud commitment in a deal announced earlier this month.
Both OpenAI and Anthropic have committed to running workloads on Amazon’s custom Trainium processors, and Facebook parent Meta recently signed a multibillion-dollar deal to use Amazon’s Graviton chips to power the agency’s AI.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy revealed in his annual shareholder letter that Amazon’s custom silicon business generates more than $20 billion in annual revenue.
Things changed again for the AWS-OpenAI partnership this week.
On Monday, Microsoft and OpenAI updated their relationship, making OpenAI free to offer all of its products — including API-based services previously exclusive to Microsoft Azure — to any cloud provider. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy immediately signaled the impact, posting on LinkedIn that OpenAI models will soon be available on Amazon’s Bedrock platform.
Amazon reports first-quarter earnings Wednesday, and the company is on track to spend $200 billion this year on capital expenditures, much of it on AI infrastructure. Jassy called AI “a rare opportunity to forever change the size of AWS and Amazon as a whole.
