Amazon launches new AI tools, as Microsoft and OpenAI end exclusive cloud deal

Big changes are underway for the Seattle area’s tech titans. Amazon and Microsoft just rewrote the terms of their partnerships with OpenAI as all three companies charge ahead into the artificial intelligence frontier.

Microsoft is no longer OpenAI’s exclusive cloud partner under their re-hashed arrangement, and Amazon was quick to seize the opportunity.

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Amazon unveiled a range of new AI services for businesses at an event in San Francisco Tuesday, including a robot recruiter that can interview job candidates and tools to take on administrative work for health care providers. The products run on AI “agents” — tools that can perform a range of tasks the way an assistant might.

“This is a huge partnership and it's one of the things that we are quite excited about,” Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said. “When we talk to companies out there, companies always want the best options. They want to be able to run in the absolute best cloud … that means they need the absolute best frontier models.”

Despite Amazon’s big push into agentic offerings, Garman dismissed fears of AI taking jobs at the company.

“ We are hiring just as many software developers as we ever had inside of Amazon and I see the demand for that really accelerating,” he said.

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That includes plans to hire 11,000 software engineering interns and full-time employees, according to Garman. Amazon didn’t respond to questions about how that stacks up to previous hiring years, but the company has laid off thousands of employees and frozen hiring in some areas.

“ I think that the nature of every job is going to change, but it's not that jobs are going away,” Garman said. “It's just that the high-value things, we're going to be able to do more of.”

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