Meta, AWS Roll Out $6 Million Startup Program To Counter OpenAI, Make Llama The Go-To AI Model For Builders

Meta Platforms Inc. META and Amazon Web Services are launching a $6 million initiative to attract 30 U.S. startups to build AI applications using Meta’s open-source Llama model, positioning the partnership as a strategic counter to OpenAI‘s closed-source dominance.

What Happened: The program offers each selected startup $200,000 in AWS cloud computing credits and six months of technical support from both companies’ engineers. AWS Vice President Jon Jones told CNN the initiative aims to “empower founders to build transformative AI using Llama models,” with applications opening this summer.

For Meta, the collaboration comes as CEO Mark Zuckerberg pours billions into AI development, recently creating a superintelligence team and offering compensation packages up to $300 million over four years to poach top researchers from competitors, including OpenAI.

The company hired OpenAI researchers Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chung for its AI lab, following Zuckerberg’s strategy to make Llama the industry standard for AI development.

The partnership highlights the industry’s fundamental divide between open-source and closed-source AI models. While OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude remain proprietary, Meta’s Llama provides free access to its underlying code. Zuckerberg argues open-source AI is “necessary for a positive AI future” and will democratize the technology’s benefits.

Why It Matters: AWS customers already use Llama for financial technology tools and customer relationship management systems for auto dealerships. The initiative could generate long-term revenue for Amazon.com Inc. AMZN if startups continue using AWS services beyond the six-month program.

The timing coincides with Meta facing an $8 billion shareholder lawsuit over Cambridge Analytica privacy violations and intense competition from ByteDance’s Swan mixed reality goggles. Meta has invested $16 billion in Reality Labs and plans additional data center investments to support its AI ambitions.

“Startups are some of the most creative forces in tech,” said Ash Jhaveri, Meta’s vice president of AI partnerships. The program will select participants based on their technical capabilities and potential solution impact.

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