Amazon is in advanced talks to invest up to $50 billion in OpenAI, a deal that would integrate ChatGPT's powerful language models directly into Alexa and other Amazon services. The collaboration, confirmed by CNBC, marks Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's boldest AI bet yet - potentially reshaping the voice assistant wars just as the company struggles to keep pace with Google's Gemini and OpenAI's own consumer products. For OpenAI, it's a strategic pivot toward enterprise dominance over flashy consumer hardware.
Amazon just made its biggest play yet to salvage Alexa from irrelevance. The company is deep in negotiations to pour up to $50 billion into OpenAI, a staggering investment that would embed ChatGPT's advanced language models throughout Amazon's ecosystem, sources told CNBC on Wednesday. CEO Andy Jassy and OpenAI's Sam Altman are personally hammering out the terms.
The deal's centerpiece: OpenAI's models would power Amazon's struggling voice assistant, which last year got rebranded as Alexa+ in a desperate bid to catch up with smarter chatbots like ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. Amazon has insisted Alexa+ is "model agnostic," meaning it can route queries to different AI providers depending on complexity. But the reality has been messier - The Information first reported Amazon needed more firepower than its current patchwork could deliver.
Right now, Alexa+ leans heavily on Anthropic's Claude model for complex questions, part of Amazon's existing $8 billion investment in the Google-backed AI startup. Amazon's top Alexa executive, Daniel Rausch, told CNBC this week that homegrown Nova models handle most traffic, with "upwards of 70 different models" in rotation. But that fragmented approach hasn't stopped Alexa from falling behind - users still complain the assistant fumbles basic requests while rivals deliver conversational brilliance.
