What We Learned About Amazon’s AI Strategy

Today on the AI Daily Brief, what we learned about Amazon's AI strategy from AWS re Invent, and before that in the headlines, more updates about forthcoming open AI models. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. Alright, friends. Quick announcements before we dive in. First of all, thank you to today's sponsors, robots and pencils, Blitsy, Robo, and Superintelligent. To get an ad free version of the show, go to patreon.com/aidailybrief, or you can subscribe on Apple Podcasts. And to learn more about sponsoring the show, shoot us a note at sponsors@aidailybrief.ai. Once again, now is your last chance to lock in 2025 rates, so shoot us a note again at sponsors@aidailybrief.ai. And with that, let's get into some updates that dropped basically as soon as I finished recording yesterday. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief headlines edition, all the daily AI news you need in around five minutes. We are in an extremely fast moving period right now. Yesterday's episode was, of course, all about OpenAI's Code Red and what it meant in terms of how they were shifting priorities and trying to push forward to improve chat j p t as well as release some new models that could help shift the narrative momentum once again. Just after I finished recording, we got more information about one of those models which is code named garlic. Sources told the information that garlic is the result of a new pre training run. They said that chief research officer, Mark Chen, had recently informed staff that garlic was performing well in internal benchmarking compared against Google's Gemini three Pro and Anthropic's Opus 4.5. Coding and reasoning tasks were a particular strength. Chen said that the model improved upon OpenAI's previous best and much larger pretrained model, g p t 4.5. Chen said that the model would be released as soon as possible, which the information interpreted as early next year, possibly as g p t 5.2 or g p t 5.5. Now garlic is apparently a separate model to Shallow Pete, which had been mentioned in Sam Altman's October memo where he warned staff to expect some rough vibes after the release of Gemini three. Altman pitched Shallow Pete as OpenAI's response to the new Google model and a way to win back momentum. Chen explained to staff that garlic incorporates bug fixes first deployed in the Shallow Pete pretraining run, suggesting that OpenAI has cleared their problems with pretraining. In a recent research note, semi analysis claimed that OpenAI had not completed a successful full scale training run on a new foundation model since g p t four o in May. That made Google's proclamation that Gemini three was an advancement in pretraining all the more impactful. If OpenAI has fixed this problem, then it paves the way for more significant advancements in the base model rather than just relying on the reinforcement learning process. Now …