OpenAI touts Amazon alliance in memo, Microsoft ‘limited our ability’
OpenAI’s newly appointed chief revenue officer, Denise Dresser, announced the company’s alliance with OpenAI in a memo to employees on Sunday. Amazon While noting the limitations of its long-standing ties with , it sees it as a key growth driver for its corporate business. Microsoft.
Dresser’s memo comes less than two months after Amazon announced plans to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI. strategic partnership. Microsoft, Amazon’s biggest cloud computing rival, has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI since 2019, backing the company long before it launched the generative AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT.
Amazon Web Services, a leader in cloud infrastructure, provides companies with access to all major artificial intelligence models, including OpenAI models, through a platform called bedrock.
“Ours Microsoft The partnership has been the foundation of our success. But this has also limited our ability to meet businesses where they are; For many, it’s Bedrock,” Dresser wrote in a note viewed by CNBC. “Since we announced the partnership in late February, the demand for this offering from our customers has been frankly staggering.”
OpenAI: hopeless To gain market share in the organization where rival Anthropic’s Claude model has proven itself as the market leader, Google Geminis also compete aggressively. Claude’s acceleration was a hot topic at the HumanX AI industry conference in San Francisco last week; Arvind Jain, CEO of enterprise AI startup Glean, described it as “Claude mania.”
“This has become a religion, this is the level of madness,” Jain said in an interview at the event.
OpenAI and Anthropic are trying to convince investors of their strengthened positions as they prepare for IPOs this year. As companies pour money into AI, the initiative is critical to them; This trend is driving down the value of public software companies that are seen as increasingly vulnerable. OpenAI, meanwhile, was valued at over $850 billion in its latest fundraising round in late March, a month after investors valued Anthropic at $380 billion.
Dresser told CNBC earlier this month that OpenAI’s enterprise business accounts for 40% of the company’s revenue and is “on track to reach parity” with its consumer business by the end of the year.
In his market note, Dresser said the market can be “noisy, volatile and distracting at times” and encouraged employees to focus on spending time with customers. He added that Anthropic’s strategy is based on “fear, restriction, and the idea that a small elite group should control AI,” while OpenAI’s “positive message” will win over time.
Dresser said Anthropic also made a “strategic misstep in not acquiring adequate compute,” echoing comments OpenAI made in a separate note to investors on Thursday. The company said Anthropic is “operating on a significantly smaller curve” and that its own launcher is “materially ahead and expanding.” Anthropic announced a deal with Google and broadcom for “more than one gigawatt” calculation earlier this month.
For OpenAI, the relationship with Microsoft is one that both companies continue to describe as fundamental and strategic, but it is showing signs of tension as partners move into the other’s turf. Microsoft added OpenAI to its list of competitors in mid-2024. annual reportIt’s a list that for years has included megacap peers Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta.
OpenAI has increasingly turned to other cloud providers. CoreWeaveGoogle and Seerfor capacity, and Microsoft last year began publicly testing a self-developed artificial intelligence model that could lead to improvements in its Copilot assistant for consumers.
OpenAI has hired Dresser, former CEO of Slack and long-time employee. sales force executive as chief revenue officer in December. He recently expanded his role to include the business responsibilities of Brad Lightcap, who transitioned from chief operating officer to a new position focused on “special projects.”
Dresser wrote that the company must “remain focused, work as one team and operate at the highest level of excellence and move in the same direction.”
“It’s up to us to win the market, let’s act accordingly,” he wrote.
—CNBC’s Kate Rooney contributed to this report.
WRISTWATCH: OpenAI goes on the offensive against Anthropic in internal memo
