Amazon founder Jeff Bezos attempts an encore and, after the great success of his first creation, gets back on track with a startup linked to the artificial intelligence sector, the main trend of the moment. According to the New York Times, Bezos has agreed to be co-CEO and financier of Project Prometheus, a nascent company that boasts a significant financial endowment (given by Bezos himself) and which focuses on the use of artificial intelligence in the design and production of computers, cars and space vehicles.
The starting capital
The starting capital of Project Prometheus – writes the US newspaper – is equal to 6.2 billion dollars, a considerable amount for a startup, especially considering that the Thinking Machines Lab reality, founded by Mira Murati, former technical director of OpenAI, has raised 2 billion dollars in funding this year. The capital contributed by Bezos therefore makes Project Prometheus one of the most funded startups of all time. Despite the rich capital endowment, it is not clear where the new startup will be based and when it will actually start.
Bezos accepts operational leadership
The owner of Amazon will share the operational leadership of the new company with the founder Vik Bajaj, a physicist-chemist who worked at Google The two co-CEOs will be supported by a team of 100 employees, a rather large and unusual number for a nascent company, largely coming from companies already active in the AI sector such as OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta.
Another bet after packages and space
This is the first time Bezos has taken an operational role at a company since he left the Amazon CEO role in 2021 to Andy Jassy. His adventure in the aerospace sector with Blue Origin, a company that competes with Elon Musk’s SpaceX, is also limited to the role of founder and financier, but Bezos has no operational roles. And after aerospace, the adventure now continues with artificial intelligence, a sector in which significant investments are still expected.
Last year, Bezos invested in Physical Intelligence, a startup that applies artificial intelligence to robots. Now, his new bet, backed by a non-negligible capital endowment, places the well-known American entrepreneur right at the center of the competition in AI, crowded by giants such as Google, Meta and Microsoft and by smaller and very specialized companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
