OpenAI, Amazon, and $38B

Good morning, AI enthusiasts. OpenAI just wrote Amazon a $38 billion check for compute — and that is just the newest in a spending spree that’s running into the trillions (!).

With questions looming concerning the sustainability given the corporate’s revenue, CEO Sam Altman had a message for apprehensive investors: sell your shares, he’ll discover a buyer.

In today’s AI rundown:

• OpenAI’s $38B compute cope with Amazon

• Coca-Cola doubles down on AI holiday ads

• Turn Microsoft Copilot into your personal tutor

• Recent benchmark tests AI’s freelance automation

• 4 recent AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

OPENAI & AMAZON

💰 OpenAI’s $38B compute cope with Amazon

The Rundown: OpenAI just secured a seven-year, $38B agreement with Amazon Web Services for computing infrastructure, marking the corporate’s largest diversification away from Microsoft’s cloud services.

The small print:

• The partnership grants OAI access to lots of of 1000’s of Nvidia GPUs across AWS data centers, with deployment targeted for late 2026 completion.

• The compute will support all the things from powering ChatGPT’s live interactions to developing upcoming models, with flexible scaling built into the contract.

• Last week’s contract renegotiation with Microsoft removed exclusivity requirements, allowing OAI to buy capability from other providers.

• The AWS agreement is a component of OAI’s broader $1.4T infrastructure buildout plan that features partnerships with Oracle, Google, Nvidia, and Broadcom

Why it matters: OpenAI continues to scale its already-staggering compute commitments, with yet one more giant deal coming at a time when many proceed to query the sustainability of spending given the AI leader’s revenue. But CEO Sam Altman had a fast answer for the skeptics — be at liberty to sell your shares.

TOGETHER WITH SLACK FROM SALESFORCE

🔎 Less searching, more finding with Enterprise Search

The Rundown: Stop the countless app-hopping! Employees waste 33% of their day attempting to find information and switching apps roughly 1,200+ times. Slack’s AI-powered search transforms chaos into clarity with one unified search bar that cuts through the noise.

With Slack Enterprise Search, you’ll be able to:

• Get fast answers from messages, files, Salesforce, OneDrive, and Google Drive

• Ask questions in plain English and get contextual answers, not keyword chaos

• Maintain enterprise-grade security while accessing real-time intelligence across tools

Download Slack’s free E-Book to see how AI search is revolutionizing workplace productivity.

COCA-COLA

🎅 Coca-Cola doubles down on AI holiday ads

The Rundown: Coca-Cola launched its 2025 holiday campaign featuring AI-generated versions of its iconic “Holidays Are Coming” commercials, one 12 months after its first AI attempt sparked backlash from creatives over the tech’s impact on artists.

The small print:

• Coca-Cola partnered with AI studios Silverside and Secret Level to supply recent spots that swap last 12 months’s unsettling human characters for animals.

• The beverage giant cut production from roughly 12 months to 30 days, with one studio needing just five specialists to generate and refine 70,000+ clips.

• Coca-Cola’s latest ad comes despite social media backlash for its 2024 Christmas ad spot, with the corporate also using AI for a separate ad in 2023.

• Global VP Pratik Thakar said AI is at the middle of Coca-Cola’s marketing transformation, and that the “genie is out of the bottle” with the usage of the tech.

Why it matters: Given the acceleration in AI video, this is probably going the last Christmas that AI’s use in video ads is even noticeable. Nevertheless it’s also notable that Coca-Cola is willing to push through the early periods of backlash to experiment with the technology, with big corporations potentially setting the tone for broader adoption across the ad industry.

AI TRAINING

📘 Turn Microsoft Copilot into your personal tutor

The Rundown: On this tutorial, you’ll learn tips on how to use Microsoft Copilot’s Vision and Voice features to rework your desktop into an interactive learning environment where you’ll be able to verbally discuss complex study materials.

Step-by-step:

1. Install Microsoft Copilot from Microsoft Store (Windows) or App Store (macOS 14.0+/M1), open the app, and check in together with your Microsoft account

2. Go to Settings via profile icon, toggle on “Voice Mode” and “Copilot Vision”, after which open your study material (PDF, notebook, etc.) within the browser

3. Say “Hey Copilot”, click specs icon (eyeglasses) to enable Vision mode, then ask: “Walk me through this paper and provides me key insights”

4. Ask follow-ups like “Explain like I’m 15 tips on how to use this idea every day” or “Generate an analogous practice problem and solve it with me interactively”

5. Close toolbar, then prompt: “Give me analogy-driven notes from our discussion with step-by-step concept breakdown” — export as Word Doc or edit before saving to your notes

Pro tip: Use Copilot’s Deep Research feature after your session to get a comprehensive evaluation and connections between concepts you have explored.

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📖 Expert guide to multi-agent systems

The Rundown: Multi-agent systems can handle more complex tasks — but are they well worth the orchestration overhead, and the way can they be made reliable in production?

Read Galileo’s guide for an exploration of multi-agent systems, and learn to:

• Design scalable multi-agent architectures and improve agentic systems

• Master context engineering for agent collaboration

• Discover and avoid common coordination pitfalls

Get your copy now.

SCALE AI

📊 Recent benchmark tests AI’s freelance automation

The Rundown: Scale AI and the Center for AI Safety published the Distant Labor Index, a brand new benchmark that tests AI models on real freelance projects, revealing that even the highest systems complete lower than 3% of tasks at skilled human standards.

The Details:

• The benchmark collected 240 accomplished assignments from verified Upwork professionals across 23 work categories, including the deliverables within the task.

• Six systems were tested on the equivalent projects, with AI outputs compared against the skilled standards of the Upwork submission.

• Manus topped the leaderboard at 2.5%, with Grok 4 and Claude Sonnet 4.5 at 2.1%, with nearly 97% of outputs failing to fulfill basic client standards.

• Issues included poor quality, incomplete deliverables, and broken files, with AI succeeding only on narrow tasks like logo creation, audio mixing, and charts.

Why it matters: The gap between benchmark hype and real-world automation just got quantified. These results show that coordinating complex deliverables still stays beyond current AI, whilst reasoning scores climb. While agents could also be chipping away at smaller subtasks, a human within the loop remains to be very much needed (not less than for now).

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 🎨 Adobe Firefly – Recent Image Model 5, Prompt to Edit, and video features

• 💡 Perplexity Patents – AI-powered patent search inside Perplexity

• 🎥 Hailuo 2.3 – MiniMax’s AI video model with upgraded realism and motion

• ⚙️ Composer – Cursor’s recent fast agentic coding model

📰 Every thing else in AI today

Zendesk’s annual AI summit is on demand. Discover at no cost how AI is shaping service by delivering resolutions at scale.*

Apple’s upcoming AI-revamped Siri will reportedly “lean on Google’s Gemini model”, in accordance with Bloomberg insider Mark Gurman.

Sam Altman was pressed on OpenAI’s revenue vs. spending on the Bg2 podcast, telling host Brad Gerstner: “If you must sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer.”

Nvidia-backed cloud startup Lambda announced a multibillion-dollar cope with Microsoft to construct AI infrastructure featuring tens of 1000’s of Nvidia GB300 chips.

Anthropic signed skilled services giant Cognizant as one in all its three largest enterprise customers, with the firm deploying Claude to its 350,000 employees.

Japanese anime, manga, and game corporations, including Studio Ghibli and Bandai Namco, wrote to OpenAI, calling to stop using their content to coach Sora video models.

Microsoft announced a $15.2B investment within the UAE through 2029, including datacenter expansion with over 80,000 Nvidia GPUs.

*Sponsored Listing

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Rob M. in Grand Rapids, MI:

“We built a multimodal chat agent to conduct corporate strategic planning research company-wide after which provide critical executive committee insights across 150 employees and 30 divisions.”

How do you utilize AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: The memos behind Altman’s ousting

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Altman wants your brain online

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Why LLMs aren’t ‘robot-ready’

• Today’s AI tool guide: Turn Microsoft Copilot into your personal tutor

• RSVP to our next workshop @ 4PM EST Friday: AI Foundations for Marketers

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown