Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, has founded a new company that he will lead. He will be one of the two directors of Project Prometheus, a new artificial intelligence startup about which he has remained silent until now, reports the website specializing in technology New Atlas.
With an initial funding of $6.2 billion, Project Prometheus will have one of the largest budgets ever for any AI startup.
The company's other director will be Vikram Bajaj, a physicist and chemist with a distinguished track record in ambitious research projects at Google X and Verily, the life sciences division of Alphabet, Google's parent company. Bajaj has a remarkable track record in ambitious projects.
Google X was a semi-secret research group set up by the American tech giant that was often described as a “fantasy project factory”. Over the years he has spawned initiatives such as Taara, a light-beam internet system, Waymo's robot taxis, the Wing drone delivery service, and others.
Bajaj also headed Foresite Labs, an incubator that supports and develops artificial intelligence startups.
Although Bezos has not spoken publicly about his new company, it is believed that given Bajaj's experience, he will coordinate the research side, while the Amazon founder will handle the business side of Project Prometheus
What does Project Prometheus want to do?
Given the secrecy with which Bezos, one of the world's richest men, has shrouded his new project, almost all information known about Project Prometheus comes from The New York Times, which published an article about the company on Monday.
According to multiple sources who spoke to NYT reporters on condition of anonymity, the AI startup has already hired around 100 people, recruiting talent from major AI companies including OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta.
NDTV recalls that Bezos, who officially stepped down from running Amazon in 2021, has a long-term interest in space travel through his company Blue Origin, and Project Prometheus is working on technologies that could eventually support his space ambitions.
Project Prometheus, whose name sounds like a reference to the mythical titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans, is part of a relatively new trend among AI companies to use artificial intelligence for practical, physical tasks, not just software.
Bezos' new company aims to develop artificial intelligence (AI) tools that can help engineers and manufacturers create products in a number of fields, including aerospace, computing and automotive.
“Is it machine learning? AI agents? Or generative AI? They're somehow connected. But people talk about them as very different building blocks. Your ability to be influenced, supported or removed from the process by any of these technologies is what causes the biggest concerns or opportunities for business,” another Silicon Valley leader, Vicky Bindra, previously explained in comments made to the tech site PYMNTS.
How will Project Prometheus work?
Unlike AI-powered chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT, which learn by analyzing huge amounts of digital content from sources like Wikipedia, press articles and books, Project Prometheus aims to develop an AI that can interact with the physical world.
While large-scale language models can mimic human language, solve math problems or even write lines of code, the artificial intelligence that Prometheus will work on will learn from real experiments, data and machines, with the aim of making scientific discoveries and contributing to engineering and manufacturing.
The initiative aims to push AI beyond its current limits, allowing it to learn in much more complex ways than simple chatbots. From automobiles to spacecraft, the project hopes to revolutionize the way products are designed, tested and built.
Although he has not officially served as Blue Origin's CEO, Bezos is believed to have been deeply involved in his aerospace company, which has recently worked on suborbital tourism, orbital launch systems and space infrastructure development.
The new role will give the billionaire, estimated by Bloomberg to be worth $245 billion, a new challenge to take on, especially considering that Project Prometheus is still in its infancy compared to everything else he's accomplished so far.
