Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is backing a new AI startup called Project Prometheus where he will help manage the company as its co-CEO, according to a report by New York Times. The new startup is coming out with a $6.2 billion funding, part of which is coming from Bezos.
Notably, this is the first time when Bezos is taking a formal operational role in a company ever since he stepped down as the CEO of Amazon in July, 2021. While Bezos is highly involved at his space startup Blue Origin, his official title at the company is that of founder.
At Project Prometheus, Bezos will co-lead the company along with Vik Bajaj who has the experience of previously leading co-founding Google's life sciences division. Bajaj is also a co-founder of Verily, a biotech startup which is owned by Alphabet. He also co-founded Foresite Labs which is an AI focused affiliate of Foresite Capital.
What is Project Prometheus?
Project Prometheus is reportedly an AI startup which is focued on applying AI to physical tasks like robotics, drug design and scientific discovery. The company has already hired almost 100 employees by poaching researchers from top AI companies like OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta.
Project Prometheus reportedly wants to build AI models that learn in more complex ways than chatbots do. Notably, large language models (LLMs) learn almost entirely by studying vast amounts of digital writing and spotting statistical patterns in how words and ideas. They then connect these patterns to generate human like responses.
However, the new AI startup wants to step from the simple pattern matching algorithm of chatbots and train models on real-world. In the new system, robots run scientific experiments on a large scale and the system watches what works and what doesn’t, and it learns from that trial-and-error loop.