322: Did OpenAI and Microsoft Break Up? It’s Complicated…

Welcome to episode 322 of The Cloud Pod, where the forecast is always cloudy! We have BIG NEWS – Jonathan is back! He’s joined in the studio by Justin and Ryan to bring you all the latest in cloud and AI news, including ongoing drama in the Microsoft/OpenAI drama, saying goodbye to data transfer fees (in the EU), M4 Power, and more. Let’s get started!   Titles we almost went with this week EU Later, Egress Fees: Google’s Brexit from Data Transfer Charges The Keys to the Cosmos: Azure Unlocks Customer Control Breaking Up is Hard to Do: Google Splits LLM Inference for Better Performance OpenAI and Microsoft: From Exclusive to It’s Complicated  Google’s New Model Has Trust Issues (And That’s a Good Thing) Mac to the Future: AWS Brings M4 Power to the Cloud Oracle’s Cloud Nine: Stock Soars on Half-Trillion Dollar Dreams ChatGPT: From Chat Bot to Hat Bot (Everyone’s Wearing Different Professional Hats) Five Billion Reasons to Love British AI NVMe Gonna Give You Up: AWS Delivers the Storage Metrics You’ve Been Missing Tea and AI: OpenAI Crosses the Pond The Norway Bug Strikes Back: A New YAML Hope A big thanks to this week’s sponsor: We’re sponsorless! Want to get your brand, company, or service in front of a very enthusiastic group of cloud news seekers? You’ve come to the right place! Send us an email or hit us up on our Slack channel for more info. AI Is Going Great – Or How ML Makes Money  01:33 Microsoft and OpenAI make a deal: Reading between the lines of their secretive new agreement – GeekWire Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding that will restructure their partnership, with OpenAI’s nonprofit entity receiving an equity stake exceeding $100 billion in a new public benefit corporation where Microsoft will play a major role. The deal addresses the AGI clause that previously allowed OpenAI to unilaterally dissolve the partnership upon achieving artificial general intelligence, which had been a significant risk for Microsoft’s multi-billion-dollar investment. Both companies are diversifying their partnerships – Microsoft is now using Anthropic’s technology for some Office 365 AI features, while OpenAI has signed a $300 billion computing contract with Oracle over five years. Microsoft’s exclusivity on OpenAI cloud workloads has been replaced with a right of first refusal, enabling OpenAI to participate in the $500 billion Stargate AI project with Oracle and other partners. The restructuring allows OpenAI to raise capital for its mission while ensuring the nonprofit’s resources grow proportionally, with plans to use funds for community impact, including a recently launched $50 million grant program. ALSO: OpenAI and Microsoft sign preliminary deal to revise partnership terms –  Chapters (00:00:00) - The Cloud Pod(00:00:34) - Microsoft and OpenAI Restructuring(00:06:55) - OpenAI's ChatGPT 5.0 Update(00:12:33) - ChatGPT: How People Are Using the Technology(00:16:33) - OpenAI's Stargate UK Announcement(00:18:24) - LocalStack for Mac: New Instances Launch(00:25:06) - Amazon EC2: More NVME Performance Metrics with EFA(00:26:43) - AWS Launches R8GN(00:28:20) - AWS CDK Preview: Refactoring with Cloudformation(00:29:59) - Amazon CloudTrail: AI Security Analysis with a McP Server(00:33:44) - Amazon Web Services: Cloud Commitment Insurance(00:35:37) - Google Cloud Launches Multi-Cloud Data Transfer Essentials(00:40:13) - Kubernetes 1.34(00:44:17) - Google Cloud introduces new recipe for disaggregated AI Inferance(00:46:47) - Google's Data Science Agent Now Generates Code for BigQuery,(00:49:09) - Google Cloud Launches DNS Armor to Detect Cyberthreats(00:52:02) - Google's Agent Payments Protocol (AP2)(00:54:32) - Google Cloud: Alloy DB on C4(00:56:42) - Google Cloud Trace now supports Open telemetry protocol (OTEL)(01:00:19) - Google's New 'Practical Guide to Data Science'(01:02:26) - Vault Gemma: The First Large Language Model with Privacy(01:06:05) - Customer Managed Keys(01:12:39) - Azure Logic Apps: Model Context Protocol Server (MCP)(01:14:46) - Microsoft's Kubernetes Storage v2(01:16:46) - Microsoft Fabric and AI Foundry: New Features, New Features(01:18:50) - Oracle Stock Jumping On Cloud Revenue Forecast(01:22:40) - Week in the Cloud: September 7, 2017