September 4th: OpenAI drops their job platform announcement. Direct competitor to LinkedIn, which Microsoft bought for $26 billion back in 2016. Ballsy move while you're still cashing Microsoft's checks.
September 6th: OpenAI announces they're partnering with Broadcom for custom chips. Translation: "We're planning our exit from Azure dependency." Real subtle, guys.
September 9th: Microsoft says "fine, we'll use Claude instead." Through AWS. Ouch.
I've been testing Claude 3.5 Sonnet vs GPT-4 for document generation since July (had early access through work). Claude actually follows PowerPoint template constraints instead of going rogue with slide layouts. GPT-4 kept fucking up our brand guidelines - adding colors that weren't in our palette, breaking text hierarchy, weird spacing. Claude just... does what you tell it to do.
Business-wise, this hurts. Microsoft's now paying Amazon around $30-35 per user per month (could be more, their pricing changes constantly) to access Claude through Bedrock. Every time someone uses Claude in Word, Amazon gets a cut. Microsoft's biggest cloud rival just became their AI supplier. That's gotta burn.
🤖 AI Model Comparison
The technical split makes sense though. Claude handles the boring stuff - PowerPoint slides, Excel formulas, formal emails where you can't sound like a human. GPT-4 keeps the creative writing and code generation. Basically Microsoft admitted what we've known for months: different models are good at different shit.
Enterprise Copilot users get Claude sometime before Christmas, assuming Microsoft doesn't hit more AWS rate limits. Free tier users are stuck waiting until 2026, maybe longer. GitHub Copilot already uses multiple models (I've seen GPT-4, Claude, and occasionally something that might be Grok), so this was coming anyway.
If you've been dealing with Copilot breaking your document formatting, Claude might actually fix that. For the rest of us, we get to watch Microsoft pay Amazon to solve problems OpenAI created.