Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the world’s wealthiest people, is throwing his money and time into an artificial intelligence start-up that he will help manage as its co-chief executive.

The company, Project Prometheus, is coming out of the gates with $6.2 billion in funding, partly from Mr. Bezos, making it one of the most well-financed early-stage start-ups in the world, said three people familiar with the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity because details had not yet been made public.

This is the first time Mr. Bezos has taken a formal operational role in a company since he stepped down as chief executive of Amazon in July 2021. Though he is deeply involved in Blue Origin, a competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, his official title at the space company is founder.

Since leaving Amazon, Mr. Bezos has received as much attention for his personal life as his businesses, including an extravagant celebrity-filled wedding in Venice this year. He has also become more closely involved in Blue Origin and has shown increasing interest in the race to build artificial intelligence.

His new company now firmly plants him in the middle of that competition. Project Prometheus is entering an increasingly crowded A.I. market, with smaller companies trying to carve out niches in a race with industry giants like Google, Meta and Microsoft and pioneering companies like OpenAI and Anthropic.

The new company has until now kept a low profile, and when it was started is not even clear. Project Prometheus is focusing on technology that dovetails with Mr. Bezos’ interest in taking people to outer space. The company is focusing on A.I. that will help in engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields, including computers, aerospace and automobiles. It is unclear where Project Prometheus will be based.

Mr. Bezos’ co-founder and co-chief executive is Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who worked closely with Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin at Google’s X, a research effort often called “The Moonshot Factory.” Google X produced a wide range of ambitious projects, including Wing, a drone delivery service and the self-driving car that became Waymo.

In 2015, Dr. Bajaj was among the founders of Verily, a research lab dedicated to the life sciences that, like Waymo and Wing, is operated by Google’s parent company, Alphabet.

Three years later, Dr. Bajaj co-founded and became chief executive of Foresite Labs, an effort to incubate new A.I. and data science start-ups. He recently left that job to focus on Project Prometheus, according to the three people who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

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Project Prometheus is among a wave of companies focused on applying A.I. to physical tasks, including robotics, drug design and scientific discovery. This year, several prominent researchers left Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other big A.I. projects to found Periodic Labs, a company that is focused on building A.I technology that can accelerate discoveries in areas like physics and chemistry.

Last year, Mr. Bezos invested in Physical Intelligence, a start-up that is applying A.I. to robots.

But the $6.2 billion in funding behind Project Prometheus potentially gives it an advantage in the expensive race to build A.I. technologies. Thinking Machines Lab, founded by a group of former OpenAI employees, raised $2 billion in funding this year.

Project Prometheus has already hired nearly 100 employees, including researchers poached from top A.I. companies such as OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta, the three people said.

A number of well-known A.I. companies — including OpenAI, Google and Meta — are already working on technologies meant to accelerate work in the physical sciences. Two researchers at Google DeepMind, the company’s primary A.I. lab, recently won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold, a project that can help accelerate drug discovery in small but important ways.

Executives at these companies and others in the field often say large language models — the technologies that power chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT — will soon achieve significant scientific breakthroughs. OpenAI and Meta say their technologies are already approaching this goal in areas like math and theoretical physics.

But companies like Periodic Labs and now Project Prometheus aim to build A.I. models that learn in more complex ways than chatbots do.

Large language models learn their skills by analyzing enormous amounts of digital text. By pinpointing patterns in Wikipedia articles, news articles and other information culled from across the internet, these systems learn to mimic the way people put words together. They can even learn to write computer programs and solve math problems.

The new companies are focusing on systems that can also learn from the physical world. Periodic Labs, which has $300 million in backing, plans to build its own lab in Northern California where robots will run scientific experiments on an enormous scale. By analyzing this physical trial and error, A.I. systems can learn to perform experiments largely on their own — at least in theory.

Project Prometheus will explore similar work, according to the people familiar with the company’s plans.

By: DocMemory
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