Summary
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Jeff Bezos is expected to take on an operational role as co-CEO of the new startup Project Prometheus, according to the New York Times.
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Company envisions AI applications in engineering, manufacturing, and physical and scientific tasks.
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According to the newspaper, Vik Bajaj, formerly of Google X and Verily, will share command with Bezos in the initiative.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is expected to take on his first formal operational role since leaving command of the retail giant in 2021. The information is from the newspaper The New York Timeswhich claims the billionaire will be co-CEO of a new artificial intelligence startup called Project Prometheus.
According to the newspaper, the company had already raised US$6.2 billion in investments, almost R$33 billion in direct conversion. This amount would have come, in part, from Bezos himself. The focus of the new company would be the development of AI applied to engineering and manufacturing in the computing, automotive and aerospace sectors.
What is Project Prometheus?
While many recent advances in AI are dominated by large language models (LLMs), Project Prometheus would be focused on a different field: exploring the technology’s application to physical and scientific tasks.
The plan would be to build AI models that learn in more complex ways. Instead of just analyzing text, these systems could learn from the physical world. Despite the low profile maintained until now, the startup has already hired almost 100 employees. Among them would be researchers and engineers recruited from cutting-edge laboratories in the AI sector, such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta.
Alongside Bezos, the co-founder and co-CEO would be Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist with experience in research and development. Bajaj previously worked at Google
In 2018, Bajaj co-founded and ran Foresite Labs, an incubator for AI and data science startups, a role he recently left to focus on Project Prometheus.
Competitive market
Bezos’ new company enters an already intensely contested AI landscape. The race for technological supremacy includes giants Google, Meta and Microsoft, in addition to the already established OpenAI and Anthropic.
The focus on AI for physical sciences is also not unique to Project Prometheus. Large laboratories are already working in this field: Google DeepMind, for example, had two researchers awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold, a system that predicts protein structures and accelerates the discovery of new medicines.
Additionally, a wave of smaller companies has been trying to carve out specific niches. Bezos himself invested last year in Physical Intelligence, another startup that applies AI to robotics. The new initiative, however, represents the billionaire’s direct and operational involvement.
The founding date and location of the Prometheus Project headquarters have not yet been disclosed.
Source: https://tecnoblog.net/noticias/jeff-bezos-deve-dividir-comando-de-nova-startup-de-ia-com-ex-google/
