Four years after stepping down as CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos is ready to lead another company. Well, at least co-lead—the New York Times reported yesterday that Bezos is the co-founder and co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a $6.2 billion AI startup that he’s partially funding.
Bezos is sharing the leadership roles with Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who worked at Google’s “Moonshot Factory,” which was known for its attempts at ambitious technological breakthroughs. Per the NYT, the extremely well-funded Project Prometheus aims to build AI models that learn in more complex ways than the LLMs that power AI chatbots:
- The company seems poised to join the competition to create world models. Such models can be taught to understand physical dimensions by getting spatial inputs or watching videos, while LLMs learn from text, which allows them to mimic human speech.
- World models can aid in the creation of technologies, like robots and video games, and can also be applied in computer science, engineering, and aerospace.
Hence, Bezos’s interest: The founder of Blue Origin, the space exploration company that turned Katy Perry into an astronaut this year, wants to pursue the tech for engineering and manufacturing.
What else is known? Much like the 2012 movie of the same name, this Prometheus has left a lot of questions unanswered. The NYT reports that the company has ~100 employees, but the publication could not determine when it was founded or where it is based. But like any good startup, it has a LinkedIn page.—DL
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