In November, Jeff Bezos announced that he would become co-CEO of a new startup called Prometheus. At the time, the startup said it would focus on “physical AI,” an increasingly common term for applying the same deep learning principles behind large language models or generative AI to things like robotics and manufacturing, but details were scarce. Now, with a major new round of funding, Bezos and co-founder Vik Bajaj have talked about it in a little more detail.
The funding round is significant: $12 billion now, after a $6.2 billion seed round last year, for a valuation of $41 billion. Funding comes from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock and others, plus a sizable amount from Bezos’s coffers. The startup currently employs 150 people.
Much of this financing will be allocated to the purchase of computing. “Oh“One of the reasons we’ve had to raise a significant amount of funding is because… what we’re doing is compute-intensive and we need to create that data,” Bezos said. said CNBC.
So what exactly are they doing? Bezos outlined an important part of the company’s focus on creating an “artificial general engineer.”
“All social wealth is driven by invention” Bezos said The New York Times. “Six thousand years ago, someone invented the plow and we all became richer. Then, much later, someone invented the steam engine and we all became richer.” He went on to say that “what Prometheus seeks to do is offer a set of tools that dramatically accelerates that invention cycle.”
