AI Daily: OpenAI takes stake in Thrive as part of partnership

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

THRIVE, OPENAI PARTNERSHIP: Thrive Holdings announced it is partnering with OpenAI to “accelerate our mission by bringing frontier AI into foundational parts of the economy.” The company added: “Our goal is to transform these sectors from the inside out and improve how employees work and the quality of service customers receive. The partnership will bring together a unique, cross-functional team, comprising OpenAI’s leading research and applied AI teams working alongside engineers, operators, and industry experts at Holdings to deeply integrate AI into the businesses that we own and operate. OpenAI will become an owner in Holdings as a result of this partnership, which we believe will align incentives for long-term value creation… We view OpenAI as a partner to both our technology strategy and long-term mission. We are excited to continue building together.”

The ChatGPT parent is taking a stake in Thrive Capital’s Thrive Holdings as part of the companies’ partnership and will embed agents in its companies, which already include an accounting and an IT business, Michael J. de la Merced of The New York Times reports. “What we’re trying to do with this partnership is really prove out ways that we can accelerate that type of transformation,” Brad Lightcap, OpenAI’s COO, said in an interview.

CODE RED: OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman told employees Monday that the company was declaring a “code red” effort to improve the quality of ChatGPT and delaying other products as a result, according to an internal memo viewed by The Wall Street Journal, The Wall Street Journal’s Berber Jin reports. Altman said OpenAI had more work to do on the day-to-day experience of its chatbot, including improving personalization features for users, increasing its speed and reliability, and allowing it to answer a wider range of questions, the author adds. The companywide memo is the most decisive indication yet of the pressure OpenAI is facing from competitors that have narrowed the startup’s lead in the AI race. Of particular concern to Altman is Google (GOOGL), which released a new version of its Gemini AI model last month that surpassed OpenAI on industry benchmark tests and sent the search giant’s stock soaring.

AWS RE:INVENT: At AWS re:Invent, Adobe (ADBE) CEO Shantanu Narayen delivered a keynote presentation focused on how AI is reshaping creativity and marketing, the companies announced. “To accelerate this transformation, Adobe and Amazon are deepening their collaboration across product innovation, new business models and enhanced customer engagement. The collaboration leverages AWS’s infrastructure to help our teams innovate even faster, from generative AI model training to AI agent deployment. Both companies are focused on a shared goal: Helping individuals and businesses stand out in today’s digital economy by making AI-powered creativity and customer experience orchestration accessible and effective. By leveraging AWS’s robust infrastructure, Adobe can seamlessly deploy AI across core offerings and focus on what it does best: Unleashing creativity across every facet of digital experiences,” the companies stated.

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services announced three frontier agents: Kiro autonomous agent, AWS Security Agent, and AWS DevOps Agent. The company said, “Frontier agents represent a new class of AI agents that are autonomous, scalable, and work for hours or days without constant intervention. Kiro autonomous agent is your virtual developer that maintains context and learns over time while working independently, so you can focus on your biggest priorities. AWS Security Agent is your virtual security engineer that helps build secure applications by being a security consultant for app design, code reviews, and penetration testing. AWS DevOps Agent is your virtual operations team member that helps resolve and proactively prevent incidents, while continuously improving your applications’ reliability and performance.”

AWS also announced the general availability of Trainium3 UltraServers powered by the new Trainium3 chip. The company said, “Trainium3 UltraServers deliver high performance for AI workloads with up to 4.4x more compute performance, 4x greater energy efficiency, and almost 4x more memory bandwidth than Trainium2 UltraServers-enabling faster AI development with lower operational costs. Trn3 UltraServers scale up to 144 Trainium3 chips, delivering up to 362 FP8 PFLOPs with 4x lower latency to train larger models faster and serve inference at scale. Customers including Anthropic, Karakuri, Metagenomi, NetoAI, Ricoh, and Splash Music are reducing training and inference costs by up to 50% with Trainium, while Decart is achieving 4x faster inference for real-time generative video at half the cost of GPUs, and Amazon Bedrock is already serving production workloads on Trainium3.”

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services, an Amazon.com (AMZN) company, announced that Sony Group Corporation (SONY) is using AWS’s comprehensive set of artificial intelligence services to accelerate its enterprise use of AI and to build Sony’s Engagement Platform to create deeper connection between fans and content creators. This partnership enables Sony to deliver Kando, a Japanese term for deep emotional connection or experience, across Sony’s diverse business portfolio, including electronics, gaming, music, movies, and anime, AWS said.
Iqvia (IQV) also announced a strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services, naming AWS as Iqvia’s preferred agentic cloud provider. Under the agreement, Iqvia will deploy its AI platform on AWS. In addition, Iqvia and AWS will explore new opportunities in life science analytics.

Additionally, NetApp (NTAP) announced a new capability that enables enterprises to make their workflows simpler and more efficient by connecting Amazon Web Services AI and Analytics services directly with their NetApp data both in the cloud and on-premises. Amazon S3 Access Points for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP enable customers to accelerate AI and analytics projects by allowing FSx for ONTAP-resident file data to be accessed via the S3 API by AWS’s extensive portfolio of AI/ML and analytics services-all while the data remains in place and is fully accessible for read / write via file protocols.

AI CHIP: Amazon’s cloud business raced to get the most recent version of its AI chip to market, reviewing efforts to sell hardware capable of competing with products from Nvidia (NVDA) and Google (GOOGL), Bloomberg’s Matt Day reports. The Trainium3 accelerator was recently installed in a number of data centers and will be purchasable by customers starting on Tuesday, Amazon Web Services vice president Dave Brown said in an interview.

COLLABORATION: AMD (AMD) announced an expanded collaboration with HPE (HPE) to “accelerate the next generation of open, scalable AI infrastructure built on AMD leadership compute technologies,” the company said. HPE will become one of the first system providers to adopt the AMD “Helios” rack-scale AI architecture, which will integrate a purpose-built HPE Juniper Networking scale-up switch – in collaboration with Broadcom (AVGO) – and software for seamless, high-bandwidth connectivity over Ethernet. “HPE has been an exceptional long-term partner to AMD, working with us to redefine what is possible in high-performance computing,” said Dr. Lisa Su, Chair and CEO, AMD. “With ‘Helios’, we’re taking that collaboration further, bringing together the full stack of AMD compute technologies and HPE’s system innovation to deliver an open, rack-scale AI platform that drives new levels of efficiency, scalability, and breakthrough performance for our customers in the AI era.”