Jeff Bezos launches USD6.2b AI startup, Project Prometheus: NYT
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The news: Founder of Amazon and one of the world’s most wealthy people, Jeff Bezos, is launching an AI startup with almost USD6.2 billion ($9.52 billion) initial funding, the New York Times reports.
The context: Project Prometheus, which Bezos is set to be partly funding, will be one of the most well-financed early-stage startups in the world.
Project Prometheus, which has until now kept a low profile, will focus on AI that will help engineering and manufacturing across a number of fields including computing, aerospace and automobiles, the NYT writes. The company is focusing on systems that can learn from the physical world as well as from large language models.
Bezos’ co-founder and co-CEO, Vik Bajaj, has previously worked with Google co-founder Sergey Brin, and is a founder of Verily, a research lab dedicated to the life sciences that, like Waymo and Wing, is operated by Google’s parent company, Alphabet. Bajaj also founded Foresite Labs, an AI and data science incubator.
Sources told the NYT that Project Prometheus has already hired almost 100 employees, including researchers poached from top A.I. companies such as OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta.
The source: NYT
