Amazon CTO Says Companies Weigh Cost When Choosing Between Open-Source and Proprietary AI Models

Amazon chief technology officer Werner Vogels said companies are shifting from expensive proprietary AI models to cheaper open-source alternatives. He made the remarks in an interview on the sidelines of the UN’s AI for Good summit. Vogels stated that a shift is occurring between the cheaper open source models and the bigger expensive models.

Cost is a very important part of architecture, he said. He added that the biggest highest-end model is not always required to solve a given problem. Uber exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget within four months.

An unnamed company spent half a billion dollars on AI in a single month after failing to limit employee usage. Vogels said transparency becomes extremely important. People want to know what is the data that goes into it, he said.

If these people serve vulnerable communities and they don’t trust the system, they won’t use it. At the same summit Amazon launched an open-source AI tool that links the AWS Registry of Open Data to AI assistants for natural-language searches. The registry holds more than 1,100 datasets from NASA, NOAA, and the NIH.

The tool allows queries for satellite imagery or genomics datasets that meet specific licensing rules.