AI bubble talk continues to fizz, but Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—one of the world’s richest people—doesn’t seem bothered by the mounting foam.
As the New York Times reported yesterday, Bezos has helped fund a new AI startup called Project Prometheus, which—with $6.2 billion in backing—would make it one of the most well-financed early-stage startups in the world. Notably, as co-CEO alongside Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who previously worked at [hotlink]Google,[/hotlink] X, the company’s “Moonshot Factory,” Bezos has taken a formal operational role in a company for the first time since stepping down as Amazon CEO in July 2021.
According to the article, the company is focusing on AI-powered engineering and manufacturing in areas including computers, aerospace and automobiles, and has poached researchers from OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta. According to someone familiar with Project Prometheus’ work, the startup seeks to apply AI to physical tasks, which requires systems that can learn not just from massive amounts of digital data, like LLMs do, but from real-world trial and error.
Still, even in the high-flying, multi-billion-dollar AI startup space, the competition is fierce: Besides the billions poured into the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk’s xAI, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines raised $2 billion earlier this year, while former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever has raised $3 billion for his research startup, Safe Superintelligence. Then there is Paris-based Mistral, which closed a Series C of about $2 billion in September, and even You.com’s Richard Socher is rumored to be trying to raise $1 billion for a new research lab.
