Amazon CTO Werner Vogels says: Rising AI bills may change how American companies use AI by shifting to ...

Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels says rising AI costs are prompting many companies to rethink how they use AI, with more businesses beginning to shift towards cheaper open-source models.

Speaking on the sidelines of the United Nations' AI for Good Summit, Vogels said organisations are becoming more careful about AI spending as the cost of using advanced models from companies such as OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind continues to rise. According to Vogels, businesses do not always need the most powerful AI model for every task and are increasingly looking for lower-cost alternatives that still meet their needs.

Companies rethink AI spending

"We see a shift happening between the cheaper open source models and the bigger expensive models," Vogels said during the interview. He said companies are paying closer attention to the cost of running AI systems as usage grows."Cost is a very important part of your architecture, you need to take that into account," Vogels said. "Do you really need to have the biggest, highest-end model to solve this? The answer is no, you don't."

The comments come as businesses report higher AI expenses. Some companies have said they exhausted their AI budgets much sooner than expected because of growing employee use of AI tools.Open-source models can often be downloaded without licensing fees, although companies still need to pay for the computing infrastructure required to run them. Even so, many businesses find them more affordable than using premium AI models that charge based on token usage.Vogels said companies are not only looking at cost but also at how AI models are built. "Transparency becomes extremely important," he said. "People want to know what is the data that goes into it." He further added that trust is especially important in sectors such as healthcare, government and humanitarian work, where organisations need to understand how AI systems are trained and how they make decisions.During the AI for Good Summit, Amazon also introduced a new open-source AI tool that helps researchers search scientific datasets using natural language. The company said the tool connects the AWS Registry of Open Data, which contains more than 1,100 datasets from organisations including NASA, NOAA and the US National Institutes of Health.