Bezos’ AI Venture Gets $6.2B to Build the Next Great AI Model

0:00Jeff Bezos is coming out of semi-retirement and has created an AI startup where he will be the co-chief executive. This is a company according to the New York Times, which is called Project Prometheus, and it is focusing on artificial intelligence for the engineering and manufacturing of computers, automobiles, and spacecraft. This is a really interesting space, and the first time that we've seen Jeff Bezos, essentially since he stepped aside from Amazon in July of 2021, come back as an executive in a company. He's obviously very deeply involved in Blue Origin, which is a competitor, Elon Musk's SpaceX, but his official title there is just founder.

0:43He's not an executive. And so this is kind of the first time that he's really stepping into that executive role. Today on the show, we're going to be breaking down everything that Mr. Bezos is going to be doing at Project Prometheus, everything that the company is planning on doing, how much money they've rays, which is eye-watering, all of that. In a second, before we do, I wanted to mention, if you want to try all of the AI models I talk about on the show, I'd love for you to try out my startup, which is called AIbox.ai. You get access to 40 plus of the top AI models from Google Gemini to OpenAI to Claude to 11 Labs for audio and a bunch of image models in one place for$20 a month.

1:21I hope it saves you money, time, and consolidates all of your AI models. All right, let's talk about the episode. So Jeff Bezos is obviously the founder of Amazon, It's one of the world's biggest companies. He's one of the world's wealthiest people, and he is now throwing his money and time into this new startup. He's going to help manage it as its co-chief executive. Now, the company has just raised$62 billion in funding. This is, of course, partly from Mr. Bezos. I think it makes it one of the most well-financed early-stage startups in the entire world. Three people that are familiar with the deal were giving essentially a bunch of the details about this, the$6.2 billion.

2:00Of course, they're speaking on conditions of anonymity because, well, this is not made public and they want to share the information. They're sharing it with the New York Times, but they can't really be made public. Now, is this shocking? I would say no. If you have someone like Jeff Bezos stepping in as the CEO of an AI company, you better bet he's going to fund it heavily. It's also interesting to me because there's kind of this joke online, and I don't know how accurate it is, but it's essentially that Jeff Bezos just copies everything Elon Musk is working on. Elon Musk was obviously doing SpaceX and then Jeff Bezos is doing Blue Origin, a space company.

2:37He later came on, came around to launch Elon Musk, obviously as Tesla car company, Jeff Bezos heavily backed Rivian, an electric car company as well. And it would now seem that with Elon Musk doing XAI, Jeff Bezos is coming in and taking a heavy role in an AI company. So with all of that being said, this is impressive because Jeff Bezos, like I mentioned earlier, it's been since July of 2021 that he stepped down as the chief executive of Amazon. And so even though he spends a lot of time with Blue Origin, this is the first time he's an actual executive. Since he left Amazon. He has been doing a lot.

3:16I think he recently got married. He's also become very involved with a lot of different companies, including things happening in space and AI and stuff. But this is the first big step he takes. His new company is now really putting him right in the middle of all of the AI competition. And raising something like$6 billion means it is a serious company that will highly compete with a lot of other players. It's obviously a crowded market right now, you have Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, like you have a lot of big players that have raised billions of dollars or control billions of dollars that are jumping into this.

3:50You know, you have like Meta and Mark Zuckerberg saying like, I'm going to spend$600 billion over the next number of years on AI and a lot of that's infrastructure, but it is quite expensive. So this new company that Jeff Bezos has founded, it's kept a very low profile right up until now, I think. No one actually even knows when it was first started. And it's focusing on a bunch of different technology that fits really well with a lot of Jeff Bezos's other interests, obviously taking people to space. Essentially, it's focused on AI that's going to help in the engineering and the manufacturing in a bunch of different fields, including computers, aerospace, and cars.

4:30So I think it's not very clear where it's going to be based out of. We don't have a lot of details about the exact company. The co-founder and that and, you know, co-chief executive that's gonna be working with Mr. Bezos is Vic Bajaj, who is a physicist and chemist who worked really closely with Google's co-founder, Sergi Brin, back when they were both working at Google X, which is essentially a research effort, often called the Moonshot Factory over at Google. And Google X makes a ton of different really ambitious projects. Some of them you might know there's you know wing which is like a drone delivery service they also spun out waymo which was a self this is a self-driving car company um so google x kind of creates these crazy ideas that i mean a bunch of them have actually launched and waymo in particular is an incredibly successful company right now that i've i've taken waymos and it's a it's amazing product driving with no people inside of the car um and so this it's kind of impressive to me that vic is coming out of Google X.

5:31He's obviously used to taking these moonshot projects, and now he's going to be working directly with Jeff Bezos on what would apparently be a new sort of moonshot AI project. So in 2015, Dr. Bajaj was one of the founders of Verily. This was a research lab dedicated to more of like the life sciences. And similar to Waymo or Wing, it was operated by Google's parent company, Alphabet. So he's been really in kind of the Google sphere for a long time. Three years after that, he went and co-founded and became the chief executive of Foresight Labs. This was essentially, they were trying to incubate kind of a new AI data science startup.

6:08He recently left that job to focus on this new project, right? So he is actually leaving this company that he co-founded to start this new one with Jeff Bezos. And obviously the opportunity is huge. But Project Prometheus is among a whole bunch of other companies that are focusing on this kind of applying AI to physics tasks. There's a bunch of robotics, drug design, scientific discovery models, and AI companies that we've seen coming out. And this year, a bunch of really prominent researchers left Meta, OpenAI, Google Deep Lab, a whole bunch of other big AI companies to go and found Periodic Labs, which I've previously reported on, which is in this exact area of kind of drug discovery.

6:50So with all of that being said, it's definitely a company that's focused on and by the way, I will mention for periodic labs, essentially how it works is they're using AI to come up with ideas for what drugs might be possible. And then they have robot arms that mix those together and actually test it in in the real world. So they're able to use robotics and AI to very quickly test a ton of different drugs, ton of different compounds, they do it in a very safe way, there's no humans right there. So it's like, you know, a chemistry lab on steroids. And it's just I think one of these areas where you can really see technology is starting to accelerate discoveries in physics, chemistry, and a bunch of other areas.

7:26It seems like Jeff Bezos is excited by this concept because he invested in physical intelligence, which is a startup that is applying AI to robotics. So he's evidently interested in this AI and robotics space, but that's not what he has now got this$6.2 billion in funding for, which is all going behind Project Prometheus, which is going to give it, I think, a big advantage in a very expensive race to build AI technologies. So, I mean, we're seeing a lot of other companies raise large amounts of money in the space. Thinking Machine Labs, which was founded by Miriam Marati, one of the co-founders of OpenAI and a bunch of other OpenAI employees, they raised$2 billion in funding this year for their company.

8:08But even that, like, you know, those are like legendary players, co-founders of OpenAI,$2 billion. This is quite impressive. And then we have, you know, $6.2 billion for Project Prometheus, who most people don't know what it is or what it's creating. I think what's interesting is Project Prometheus, they've already hired over 100 employees. They have researchers that they stole from a bunch of the top AI companies, Meta, DeepMind, OpenAI. All of these have been subject to poachings by this company. And a number of really well-known AI companies are already working on technologies that are trying to focus on this accelerated work and physical sciences.

8:47So you can look at like OpenAI, Google Meta, all three of those are working in this space as well. Two researchers over at Google DeepMind recently actually won a Nobel Peace Prize in chemistry for their work at AlphaFold. This was coming out of the Google DeepMind primary AI lab. And it was a project that essentially is helping to do drug discovery. They do it in a bunch of interesting, unique ways, but they actually won a Nobel Peace Prize. So I think executives at a lot of those different large companies and in other fields are seeing the power that is in scientific discovery. We hear Sam Altman talk about this a lot.

9:26Martin Zuckerberg talk about this a lot. Even in all the benchmarks that these companies are revealing, they're talking about how it impacts math and theoretical physics. But I think companies like Periodic Labs and now Project Prometheus, they're trying to build an AI model that is a little bit more complex than just that. right? They're trying to actually impact things in the physical world, which is fascinating. So with all of the new companies that are focusing on systems that can learn from physical, you know, from the physical world, Periodic Labs, which has raised$300 million, is planning to build its own lab in Northern California, where robots are going to run all these scientific experiments on an enormous scale.

10:05They're going to be analyzing a whole bunch of, you know, physical trial and error stuff. And they will be learning to do a whole bunch of experiments, which they'll be doing basically all on their own, which is exciting. I think Project Prometheus is going to explore really similar work to that, according to some people familiar with what the company is working on. So this is definitely a company to keep in mind. I mean, anytime you see Jeff Bezos or any of these major players jumping in to become the CEO of a company, you know it means business. And raising$6.2 billion is obviously a very serious company.

10:37So definitely one to keep an eye on. I'll keep you up to date on everything that rolls out with the company. Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast today. Make sure to leave us a rating review wherever you get your podcasts and make sure to go check out AI box.ai to get all of the AI models in the world in one place for 20 bucks a month. Catch you guys in the next episode.