OpenAI released its first open-weight AI models in more than five years, and Amazon quickly said they will be available on its Bedrock and SageMaker platforms — the first time the cloud giant has offered products from the ChatGPT maker.
The surprise announcement comes at a pivotal moment in OpenAI’s longstanding relationship with Microsoft, which has invested about $13.75 billion in the San Francisco-based company. Microsoft has exclusive rights to OpenAI’s API on its Azure cloud platform.
OpenAI says the new models, gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b, are state-of-the-art language models with advanced reasoning capabilities. Their status as open-weight models means that the underlying parameters, or weights, that determine their behavior are freely available for download. This lets developers and companies customize, fine-tune, and deploy the models for themselves.
The new models are available under the Apache 2.0 free software license, which means they aren’t subject to the exclusive provisions of OpenAI’s Microsoft technology agreement. As a result, any cloud provider could offer them — although it’s clear from the timing that Amazon got a heads up, at least.
Amazon trumpeted the news, saying that the availability of the models on Amazon Web Services “will put more powerful AI technologies into the hands of organizations and expand the impact of OpenAI’s leading technology by making it available to the millions of customers on AWS, the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud.”
OpenAI said as part of its announcement that Microsoft is bringing GPU-optimized versions of the smaller gpt-oss-20b model to Windows devices.
Because they’re open-source, the models are not governed by OpenAI’s exclusive agreements with Microsoft, a Microsoft spokesperson confirmed, adding that the Redmond company approved of OpenAI taking this approach.
Amazon Web Services has likely lost some business in the past due to the fact that it didn’t have any OpenAI models to offer, said Patrick Moorhead, CEO and chief analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy.
“While these aren’t the best OpenAI models, they are a start,” Moorhead said via email. “Microsoft will continue to have the best Open AI models out there, but they now have some competition with different modalities.”
Amazon’s Bedrock platform offers customers a wide selection of AI models from various companies. In part as a response to Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership, Amazon has invested $8 billion in its partner Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, and offers the startup’s models on the platform.
Microsoft and OpenAI are currently in talks to renegotiate their agreement in a deal that could give Microsoft ongoing access to critical OpenAI technology, even if the startup achieves its goal of building artificial general intelligence (AGI), according to a Bloomberg News report last week.
The talks have reportedly expanded into a larger renegotiation. One key issue is the size of Microsoft’s equity stake as OpenAI converts to a for-profit entity.
