Hard Numbers: Amazon’s spending blitz, Cal State gives everyone ChatGPT, a $50 AI model, France and UAE shake hands

100 billion: Amazon disclosed plans on Thursday to spend $100 billion this year to capitalize on a “once-in-a-lifetime type of business opportunity” in artificial intelligence. That would represent a 20% increase in the company’s capital expenditures from 2024 when it spent $83 billion. “The vast majority of that capex spend is on AI for AWS,” CEO Andy Jassy told investors.

500,000: More than half a million new people will gain access to a specialized version of ChatGPT after OpenAI struck a deal with California State University, which has 460,000 students and 63,000 faculty members across 23 campuses. Students and faculty will be able to use a specialized version of the chatbot that can assist with tutoring, study guides, and administrative tasks for staff. The price of the deal is unclear.

50: Researchers at Stanford University and the University of Washington trained a large language model they say is capable of “reasoning” like the higher-end models from OpenAI and Anthropic. The catch? They did it while spending only $50 in compute credits. The new model, called s1, is “distilled” from a Google model called Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental, a process that allows training fine-tuned models based on larger ones.

1: France and the United Arab Emirates struck a deal to develop a 1 gigawatt AI data center on Thursday, ahead of the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris. It’s unclear where the data center will be located, but the agreement means that it will serve both French and Emirati AI efforts.