Jeff Bezos founds AI startup Project Prometheus

Multimillionaire status is apparently not enough for Jeff Bezos. The Amazon founder and former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a new job: according to the New York Times, he is Co-CEO of the AI startup Project Prometheus, which is said to have already received funding of 6.2 billion US dollars. The money likely comes partly from Bezos himself. The company's exact plans are still unknown. The focus is said to be on AI that will improve manufacturing in areas such as computers, automotive, and aerospace.

Project Prometheus apparently still under development

As the New York Times reports (paywall) reports, Bezos's new startup has allegedly been operating and developing in so-called “stealth mode” for some time. It is not concretely known when the company was founded. Its Co-CEO and co-founder is Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who worked closely with Google co-founder Sergey Brin in Google's Moonshot division X and co-founded the health tech company Verily, which is a spin-off of the Alphabet division. He only recently made his status as co-founder and Co-CEO of the new startup public on LinkedIn. According to this, he has held the new position since the beginning of November.

According to information available to the New York Times, and which is said to come from three individuals familiar with the project who wish to remain anonymous, the company is focusing on artificial intelligence for the design and manufacturing of computers, automobiles, and spacecraft. Further concrete and, above all, official details are not currently available. The startup Project Prometheus could, among other things, serve to support Bezos's other companies, such as the space company Blue Origin, with AI technology.

Good starting position

The startup Project Prometheus would not be the first company to focus on applying AI to physical tasks such as robotics, drug development, and scientific discoveries. Competitors in this sector include the startup Periodic Labs, which has poached employees and researchers from Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and other major AI projects in recent months. The company is focusing on developing AI solutions to accelerate developments in physics and chemistry, it is said.

For Bezos, the sector is not entirely new: last year he invested $(LB4704012:millions of US dollars in the startup Physical Intelligence|_blank), which aims to bring universal AI into the physical world of robotics. To this end, physical intelligence is developing foundational models and learning algorithms that can control robots and physical devices.

With an estimated starting capital of 6.2 billion dollars, Project Prometheus is likely to have “an advantage in the expensive race to develop AI technologies,” writes the New York Times. According to the report, the startup has already hired around 100 employees, including researchers poached from leading AI companies such as OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta.

(afl)