Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder and executive chairman, has been working on a new AI venture called Project Prometheus (06/06). The project, backed by $6.2 billion in funding, is developing AI systems aimed at assisting in manufacturing computers, cars, and spacecraft, according to sources familiar with the venture.

The initiative has already hired over 100 employees, including some from the recently acquired startup General Agents. Bezos will co-lead Prometheus alongside tech entrepreneur Vik Bajaj, a former executive at Alphabet’s health sciences company Verily.

Acquisition of General Agents Strengthens AI Team

Records show that Bajaj formed a corporate entity to acquire General Agents immediately after hosting a private AI-focused dinner in San Francisco (06/06). Four days later, the acquisition was merged with Ozair’s startup. General Agents’ headquarters is now listed at Foresite Labs, a biotech incubator led by Bajaj.

Several employees of General Agents, including cofounder William Guss, updated their LinkedIn profiles to reflect their new roles at Prometheus following the acquisition.

Key AI Talent Joins Project Prometheus

Sherjil Ozair, former senior researcher at DeepMind and Tesla, joined Prometheus through the General Agents acquisition. Other experts present at the June dinner, including former Nvidia scientist Kamyar Azizzadenesheli, also joined the venture earlier this year.

Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit, both former Google researchers and coauthors of a well-known AI paper, serve as founding advisers to Prometheus while managing their own startups.

Ace Technology and Its Role in Prometheus

General Agents’ main product, Ace, is described as a “real-time computer pilot” capable of performing actions across multiple apps based on user commands. A demo showed Ace downloading an image and sending it over iMessage in under 15 seconds.

Ace’s integration into Project Prometheus is not fully detailed. However, new versions of Ace continue to be released, and team members in India helping train Ace have also joined Prometheus.

Industry Reactions to the Acquisition

The acquisition has prompted mixed reactions in the AI industry. Harsha Abegunasekara, CEO of Donely, a competitor to Ace, said the deal is a “mixed bag” for investors. Some view the removal of a competitor positively, while others are concerned about facing Bezos’ venture if Ace becomes central to Prometheus’ development.

“There is something important there for Prometheus to get the entire company,” Abegunasekara said. “What General Agents really cracked early on is speed—Ace runs on your computer at light speed. We’ve been working on that six months and haven’t achieved it yet.”

PHOTO: FREEPIK

This article was created with AI assistance.