Jeff Bezos is gainfully employed once more, after having left his post as Amazon CEO back in 2021. Cade Metz at The New York Times reports that the billionaire founder of space tech giant Blue Origin is now co-CEO at Project Prometheus, a startup that describes itself as building "AI for the physical economy."
Indeed, sources who remained anonymous said Project Prometheus is "focusing on AI that will help in engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields, including computers, aerospace and automobiles." The company has already raised US$6.2 billion in funding, and is said to have brought more than 100 employees on board from the likes of Meta, OpenAI, and DeepMind. A number of LinkedIn profiles of its founding members list previous experience at Microsoft, DeepMind, and Nvidia, with AI and robotics research backgrounds.
We don't yet know exactly what Project Prometheus will build, or where it will set up shop. What we do know is that Bezos is sharing CEO duties with physicist Vik Bajaj, who has an illustrious track record of working on ambitious ventures. He previously collaborated on Google's X, which has been described as a 'moonshot factory' that birthed projects like Taara light-beamed internet, Waymo robotaxis, the Wing drone delivery service, and exoskeleton-equipped pants.
Bajaj also co-founded a life sciences research outfit called Verily, and ran Foresite Labs, which incubates AI startups.
There's more that alludes to Project Prometheus' possible ambitions. Last year, Bezos participated in a $400 million funding round for Physical Intelligence, a San Francisco-based startup using AI to enhance robots' capabilities like making espressos without spilling coffee all over the place, and assembling boxes.
Metz also notes that the company will be involved in enabling robots to observe and run scientific experiments autonomously and at scale. There's speculation that this might eventually propel Bezos' efforts to get more people to outer space too, though the steps between that and the little we know about this firm are unclear. From the report, it seems more immediately plausible that Project Prometheus' tech could augment the capabilities of humanoids in workplaces – or help build them.
AI and robotics are increasingly being incorporated into the manufacturing sector: Agility Robotics claims its Digit bot is the first-ever commercially deployed humanoid robot on factory floors, while Texas-based Apptronik is working towards having its Apollo humanoid manufacture more units of itself. We've also seen AI being deployed to crack chemical combinations for making ammonia, develop stronger nanomaterials, and even advancing the designs of processors to enable artificial intelligence.
Bezos is said to have been deeply involved in Blue Origin, which has most recently been working on suborbital tourism, orbital launch systems, and space infrastructure development. The new role will give the third richest man on the planet a new challenge to dive into, especially given that it's currently a fledgling operation in comparison to everything else he's built up thus far.
Source: The New York Times
