TechPulse USA

Microsoft Undercuts OpenAI 58% With Model on Alibaba's Qwen Microsoft has just picked a fight with its closest partner — and armed itself with a Chinese rival's technology. On Friday, the company launched Decision-1, a model that does exactly what OpenAI's brand-new GPT-6 Luna Decisions does, costs 58% less, and is built on Alibaba's Qwen3.5. If you were waiting for proof that the Microsoft–OpenAI partnership has quietly turned into a rivalry, here it is: priced in cents, benchmarked in public, and impossible to misunderstand. Decision-1 is a decision model, not a chatbot. You hand it a piece of text and a fixed list of options — yes/no, multiple choice, a rating scale — and it returns a calibrated probability for each option in a single structured API call. No prose, no explanations, no chat. The output is JSON that software can act on immediately: above a confidence threshold the ticket routes itself, below it the case goes to a human. Microsoft is pitching it as t...

AI AGENTS Nobody planned this week. Amazon just open-sourced a decision-making AI that doesn't chat, doesn't write, and can't explain itself — by design. It started as one engineer's side project. And it landed in the same week that OpenAI and Cloudflare shipped their own versions of the exact same idea. Published October 3, 2026 · By Daniel Rao Photo: Server racks in a data centre. Strands Decider 2B is built to run on ordinary hardware — AWS says it can return a decision on a laptop in about 150 milliseconds. Credit: Carl Lender / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0. On Thursday, Amazon Web Services released a model that answers questions in a tenth of a second and costs nothing to download. It will not write you a poem. It will not debug your code, explain its reasoning, or argue with you. Ask it an open-ended question and you have wasted your time, because it cannot answer one. That is the entire point. Strands Decider 2B does exactly one thing: given a fixed s...