By Deborah Mary Sophia and Greg Bensinger
April 28 (Reuters) – OpenAI is now offering its latest AI models and its Codex coding agent on Amazon’s cloud services platform, the companies said on Tuesday, a day after the ChatGPT creator loosened its ties with long-time backer Microsoft.
OpenAI is also rolling out a service for developers to build and deploy advanced AI agents with its frontier models on Amazon Web Services.
“This is what our customers have been asking for a really long time. Their production applications run in AWS. Their data is AWS,” said Matt Garman, CEO of AWS, at an event in San Francisco. Customers will no longer have to leave AWS to find the AI models they want, he said.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who appeared at the event via a pre-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 is expected to testify at a federal trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI that began on Tuesday.
OpenAI and Microsoft on Monday renegotiated a contract that had allowed the Windows maker to exclusively sell OpenAI’s AI models on its Azure cloud platform, making room for OpenAI to forge new partnerships with the likes of Amazon and Google.
Amazon and OpenAI have been deepening their ties for several months now. While Amazon invested $50 billion in OpenAI, the AI startup committed to spend $100 billion on AWS over the next eight years. The companies have also reached an agreement for OpenAI to use two gigawatts of computing powered by Amazon’s in-house Trainium AI chips.
OpenAI is racing to secure more computing capacity to beef up its enterprise business and better compete with rival Anthropic, whose Claude models have surged in popularity and made the startup a frontrunner in the AI race.
Separately, Amazon announced new autonomous software products, known as agents, targeting companies seeking a boost to their supply-chain planning or planning large-scale hiring, such as retailers before the holiday selling season.
For OpenAI, making Codex available on AWS will help drive enterprise adoption and expand the reach of the coding agent, which has more than 4 million weekly active users.
For Amazon, being able to fully host and distribute OpenAI’s products would allow it to expand beyond its reliance on Anthropic. The company has been seeking to reassure investors that its hefty AI investments are starting to pay off.
Earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy disclosed that AI services at AWS generated annualized revenue of more than $15 billion in the first quarter. AWS revenue growth has also climbed back up past the 20% mark in the past two quarters, boosting investor confidence.
Amazon shares were little changed after the announcement, trading down less than 1%.
(Reporting by Deborah Sophia in Bengaluru and Greg Bensinger in San Francisco; Editing by Shinjini Ganguli, Shilpi Majumdar and Edmund Klamann)
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