Companies are shifting toward cheaper open‑source AI models to rein in costs, Amazon CTO says

Companies worried about mounting AI bills are increasingly shifting to cheaper, open-source models, according to Amazon’s chief technology officer, Werner Vogels.

“We see a shift happening between the cheaper open source models and the bigger expensive models,” Vogels said in an interview on the sidelines of the UN’s AI for Good summit. 

Stories of runaway AI bills have been making some executives skittish about building systems on the most advanced models from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, that bill by the token. (A token is the basic unit of data an AI model processes, equivalent to about a word and a half of English language text.) Uber said it burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months, while company reportedly burned through half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to cap AI usage for employees have caused concern across industries. 

Fears of runaway spending are forcing companies to rethink how—and where—they deploy the most powerful frontier models. While large models from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google often........

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