What is Project Prometheus? Jeff Bezos is co-founder to new AI startup worth $6.2B
Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos has joined in on the Artificial Intelligence race as the co-founder of Project Prometheus.
Bezos will be the co-CEO of the project along with Google researcher Vik Bajaj, according to a report in the New York Times. The project is already well-financed at its early stage with about $6.2 billion in funding.
The AI market is already crowded and dominated by companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft, along with OpenAI and Anthropic, and Bezos' company will find itself in the middle of an ongoing competition.
Details of the project have not yet been made public. However, three anonymous sources who spoke to the NYT gave some insight into what the project aims to achieve. Project Prometheus will focus on technology that will assist Bezos’ interest in engineering and manufacturing material needed to build technology that will take people to outer space.
The AI model that the company builds will be helping the manufacturing of computers, aerospace, and automobiles. The company will be focused on applying AI to physical tasks that go beyond large language models or LLMs. LLMs learn by finding patterns in articles and information from the internet. However, newer AI companies are trying to create systems that can learn from the physical world.
Periodic Labs is one such company formed this year that is aiming to create such technology. The company is planning to build its own lab in Northern California, where robots will run scientific experiments on an enormous scale.
Project Prometheus aims to do something similar. The company currently has 100 employees, which include researchers who left comapanies like OpenAi, DeepMind, and Meta. The company aims to build AI models that learn in more complex ways than chatbots do.
Yan CeLeun, Meta’s Chief AI scientist, said that LLM’s are a dead end and they will never be able to achieve human-level reasoning. LeCun said that LLMs lack true understanding and meaningful interaction with the physical world which makes their intelligence far below than that of a house cat.
Vik Bajaj, the co-founder, is a physicist and chemist who worked closely with Google co-founder Sergey brin at Google’s X. In 2015, Bajaj was one of the founders of Verily, a research lab that helped found Waymo and Wing, a self-driving car company and drone delivery service project operated by Alphabet, Google's parent company.
Sci/Tech