OpenAI’s artificial intelligence models could help power supply Amazon’s CNBC confirmed Wednesday the e-commerce giant’s digital assistant Alexa and other internal projects.
The partnership is being discussed in parallel with ongoing negotiations for Amazon to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified because the details are confidential.
OpenAI may also use Amazon’s AI chips and computing as part of the deal, the person said.
Amazon declined to comment. The Information first reported on the partnership.
As previously reported by CNBC, investment talks between Amazon and OpenAI have not yet been finalized and are subject to change. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman engage in the discussion directly.
For Amazon, having access to OpenAI’s models could accelerate AI efforts across multiple departments within the company. In addition to Alexa, Amazon has invested heavily in building a shopping chatbot called Rufus. The chatbot is embedded in the company’s e-commerce app and uses a custom internal model to respond to queries.
Last year, Amazon released an improved version of its 11-year-old Alexa aimed at competing with leading chatbots such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Amazon said its new service Alexa+ is “model agnostic,” meaning it may invoke different AI models from different providers depending on the task.
CNBC previously reported that Anthropic’s Claude model handles many of Alexa+’s more complex queries. Amazon has an existing relationship with OpenAI rival Anthropic, with an $8 billion investment.
Daniel Rausch, Amazon’s head of Alexa, said in an interview with CNBC this week that the majority of traffic is routed to the company’s Nova model. Rausch added that the company uses more than 70 different models and said the company has “great partnerships” with Anthropic and other model providers hosted by the Bedrock service.
OpenAI also has an existing relationship with Apple regarding its Siri voice assistant. Last month, Apple signed a deal with Google to use the company’s Gemini model in an upgraded Siri voice assistant that will be released later this year.
According to people familiar with the company’s strategy, OpenAI sees the opportunity to collaborate with Amazon as a more “aggressive” move into a broader range of corporate activities than its collaboration with Apple, which could increase competition from OpenAI’s new devices.
OpenAI has been making big inroads into devices, including acquiring Jony Ive’s AI device startup io for about $6.4 billion last year.
