SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — In a significant business development, Amazon revealed Tuesday it was dramatically expanding its collaboration with OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, coming just 24 hours after OpenAI announced it would reduce its dependency on Microsoft.
The partnership between Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, and OpenAI will focus on jointly creating a new platform designed for AI agents capable of performing computer tasks for users, according to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
Altman delivered his remarks through a pre-recorded video to attendees at an Amazon conference in San Francisco, while simultaneously attending a federal court hearing in Oakland for a lawsuit filed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI.
On Monday, Microsoft revealed it would end its revenue-sharing arrangement with OpenAI, marking another step in distancing itself from a partnership that sparked the current artificial intelligence revolution.
Initially, OpenAI depended entirely on Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure investments to develop the technology that made ChatGPT widely recognized. Microsoft leveraged OpenAI’s innovations to create its own AI tool, Copilot.
However, the relationship has transformed as OpenAI, originally established as a nonprofit organization in San Francisco, has moved toward becoming a profit-driven company preparing for a stock market debut. The AI firm has also diversified its cloud partnerships beyond Microsoft to include Amazon, Google, and Oracle.
While OpenAI announced Monday it would maintain revenue sharing with Microsoft until 2030, the payments will now have limits. OpenAI has been aggressively pursuing corporate clients to increase sales of its artificial intelligence solutions. The company’s chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, also participated in the Amazon conference.
Microsoft will continue as OpenAI’s main cloud provider, and OpenAI’s products will debut first on Microsoft’s Azure platform, “unless Microsoft cannot and chooses not to support the necessary capabilities,” according to statements from both companies.
During his Tuesday presentation, Altman indicated that Amazon possessed the required technical capabilities.
“These systems need to run reliably and robustly,” Altman stated. “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.”
