Jeff Bezos Takes the Reins as Co-CEO at a New AI Startup

Jeff Bezos is branching out.

The 61-year-old Amazon founder is investing $6.2 billion into a brand new AI firm known as Mission Prometheus, and he’ll function the startup’s co-CEO, in line with the New York Times.

The corporate, which the New York Occasions has known as one of the crucial well-financed early-stage startups on the earth, will deal with constructing AI to help engineering and manufacturing operations throughout industries.

Bezos’ co-founder and co-CEO within the enterprise is physicist and chemist Vik Bajaj. He’s finest recognized for his work at Google X, the corporate’s moonshot manufacturing unit that works on “radical new technology.”  The lab is behind early help for Google-backed corporations like robotaxi large Waymo and life sciences firm Verily, which Bajaj co-founded in 2015. Bajaj was most just lately the CEO of AI startup incubator Foresite Labs, which he allegedly left to deal with the brand new enterprise with Bezos.

Apart from Bajaj and Bezos, Mission Prometheus has virtually 100 staff, together with veterans from OpenAI and Meta, in line with the New York Occasions.

Not a lot else is understood about Mission Prometheus. The corporate goals to construct AI instruments for use in industries like aerospace and automotive, however there isn’t any info but on what precisely that may appear to be, the place the corporate shall be primarily based, or when the enterprise was even began.

The transfer marks Bezos’ first operational position in an organization since he abdicated the throne at Amazon to present CEO Andy Jassy in 2021. Bezos has held a number of different founder positions since then, like at his house firm Blue Origin, which shot Katy Perry into orbit earlier this 12 months, however he has not labored as a chief govt in just a few years and has largely been residing the lifetime of a retiree.

Though his latest private focus has largely been the ultimate frontiers of house, Bezos has saved up with the AI hype. Early final 12 months, the multibillionaire invested millions of {dollars} into Perplexity, an AI firm that’s after Google’s search engine domination.

At a conference final month, Bezos talked about his imaginative and prescient for sending data centers into space, and known as synthetic intelligence an “industrial bubble” that isn’t a nasty factor, perhaps even “good.”

Bezos’s newest enterprise into the AI world is coming at a time when the AI trade is presenting a renewed curiosity in bodily AI. Business titan Nvidia put bodily AI entrance and middle on the firm’s newest GTC convention in Washington, D.C., final month. In the meantime, Meta’s prime AI scientist, Yann LeCun, is reportedly quitting quickly to construct his personal AI startup that may deal with “world models” as a substitute of enormous language fashions. World fashions make up the idea of bodily AI.

This isn’t the primary bodily AI enterprise for Bezos himself, both. The tech govt invested in AI robotics startup Physical Intelligence late final 12 months.

Underlying this latest push in the direction of bodily AI in an trade that has been dominated by LLMs within the latest previous is a rising concern that enhancements in AI capabilities are plateauing. These fears have by no means been extra overtly mentioned than after OpenAI’s extremely anticipated GPT-5 announcement earlier this 12 months was largely deemed a flop by followers. With AI investments persevering with to skyrocket, the trade may very well be trying into bodily AI for a much-needed re-injection of hype.