Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is backing a new AI startup called Project Prometheus where he will help manage the company as its co-CEO, according to a report by The New York Times. The new startup is coming out with $6.2 billion in funding, part of which is coming from Bezos.
Notably, this is the first time that Bezos is taking a formal operational role in a company since he stepped down as the CEO of Amazon in July 2021. While Bezos is highly involved with his space startup Blue Origin, his official title at the company is that of founder.
At Project Prometheus, Bezos will co-lead the company along with Vik Bajaj who has the experience of previously co-founding Google's life sciences division. Bajaj is also a co-founder of Verily, a biotech startup owned by Alphabet. He also co-founded Foresite Labs which is an AI focused affiliate of Foresite Capital.
Project Prometheus is reportedly an AI startup focused on applying AI to physical tasks like robotics, drug design and scientific discovery. The company has already hired almost 100 employees by poaching researchers from top AI companies like OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta.
Project Prometheus reportedly wants to build AI models that learn in more complex ways than chatbots do. Notably, large language models learn almost entirely by studying vast amounts of digital writing and spotting statistical patterns in how words and ideas connect. They then use these patterns to generate human like responses.
However, the new AI startup wants to step away from the simple pattern matching approach of chatbots and train models on the real world. In the new system, robots run scientific experiments on a large scale and the system watches what works and what doesn’t and learns from that trial Notably, Bezos had invested last year in an AI startup called Physical Intelligence which is also working on applying AI to robots. The company is also working on building systems that learn from the real world and has $300 million in funding and a lab in Northern California where it runs scientific experiments.
While Bezos did not immediately give a comment on his new startup, the entrepreneur has been bullish on the new technology in the past.
In an interview with The New York Times last year, Bezos was asked what he was doing during his time at Amazon as its executive chairman. Bezos stated that a vast majority of his time was spent on helping Amazon navigate and lead in the AI race.
The billionaire has also compared AI to many other transformational technologies of the past like electricity and compute.
“Modern AI is a horizontal enabling layer. It can be used to improve everything. It will be in everything. This is most like electricity, these kinds of horizontal layers like electricity and compute and now artificial intelligence, they go everywhere. I guarantee you there is not a single application that you can think of that is not going to be made better by AI,” Bezos said last year.
