Jeff Bezos re-enters tech leadership as Co-CEO of new AI startup project Prometheus
Jeff Bezos has joined AI startup Project Prometheus as co-CEO, marking his return to an operational role since leaving Amazon's top post in 2021. The company launches with $6.2 billion in funding and aims to build AI systems that learn from real-world experiments rather than text data.
New Delhi: Jeff Bezos has officially returned to the world of working leadership with a new AI startup, Project Prometheus, which is aimed at bringing new AI to the real world of working with physical objects. The New York Times reports that Bezos will be a co-CEO at the company, as that will be his first known leadership position since leaving Amazon as CEO in 2021. The firm enters with an enormous capital base of $6.2 billion in capital, and a big part of this capital is funded by Bezos himself.
This has already given the startup a staff of almost 100 employees, several of whom have been stolen out of large AI labs, including OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta. Project Prometheus is meant to address fields such as robotics, drug discovery and scientific research based on the AI systems being able to learn not only by reading the text but also by direct interaction with the real world.
In Project Prometheus, Bezos will be co-leader of the company with Vik Bajaj, who has the experience of co-founding the Google division of life sciences previously. Bajaj is also a co-founder of Verily, a biotech Alphabet company. He also jointly founded Foresite Labs, which is an AI-geared affiliate of Foresite Capital.
What is Project Prometheus working on?
Project Prometheus will create AI models that will go beyond pattern-matching chatbots. The startup does not only want its systems to learn when exposed to digital text alone but also to follow the outcomes of massive scientific tests conducted by robots. The models will train through observing what works and what does not and form higher reasoning levels. The strategy resembles one of Bezos-backed Physical Intelligence, an artificial intelligence enterprise which deals with robotics, which he invested in last year.
Bezos was an early enthusiast concerning artificial intelligence and its disruptive force. He told the interviewer last year that his main focus and effort as the executive chairman at Amazon has been to enable the company to master the AI game. He has compared AI to such significant technological changes as electricity and computing, declaring it a universal technology that will affect all industries.