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Billionaire Jeff Bezos. Photo: New York Times . |
According to the New York Times , Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos is building Project Prometheus, an AI startup focused on the engineering and manufacturing of computers, cars, and spacecraft.
With initial funding of $6.2 billion (partially from Bezos), this is one of the startups with the largest funding sources currently.
At Prometheus, Bezos is involved as co-CEO. This marks the first time the billionaire has taken on an official executive role since stepping down from Amazon in July 2021. Although he joined the space company Blue Origin, his official title there is founder.
Jeff Bezos' new project
Since leaving Amazon, Bezos's personal life and business ventures have attracted significant public attention. Earlier this year, he and Lauren Sánchez held a lavish wedding in Venice, Italy, attended by many celebrities. Bezos has also focused on Blue Origin and the AI trend.
Project Prometheus enters the highly competitive AI field, where smaller companies strive to carve out niches to challenge giants like Google, Meta, and Microsoft, alongside pioneers such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
Information about Project Prometheus is still quite scarce, and even its founding date is unclear. Rumors suggest the project focuses on developing technology to support Bezos's ambition of sending humans into space.
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Jeff Bezos focused on his space company Blue Origin after leaving Amazon. Photo: Blue Origin . |
Project Prometheus will focus on building AI to support engineering and manufacturing in several fields such as computing, automotive, and aerospace. The startup's headquarters location is currently unknown.
Besides Bezos, the other co-founder and co-CEO of Project Prometheus is Dr. Vik Bajaj. He is a physicist and chemist who previously worked with Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google) at Google X, where ambitious projects such as drone delivery and self-driving car services called Wing were created, later becoming Waymo.
In 2015, Dr. Bajaj co-founded Verily, a life sciences research lab run by Alphabet (Google's parent company). Three years later, he co-founded and became CEO of Foresite Labs, a company that invests in AI and data science startups.
According to sources, Bajaj left his job at Foresite Labs to focus on building Project Prometheus with Jeff Bezos.
How does Project Prometheus benefit society?
Project Prometheus is part of a wave of companies applying AI to physics projects such as robotics, drug research, and science.
Previously, several prominent researchers left Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and other large projects to form Periodic Labs, focusing on building AI for physics and chemistry. Last year, Bezos invested in Physical Intelligence, a startup that applies AI to robotics.
The $6.2 billion funding could give Project Prometheus an advantage in the race to build expensive AI. For comparison, Thinking Machines Lab, founded by a group of former OpenAI employees, raised $2 billion this year.
According to the New York Times , Project Prometheus has employed nearly 100 people, including researchers at major companies such as OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta.
Not just independent laboratories or startups, but companies like OpenAI, Google, and Meta are researching AI technologies to accelerate work progress in fields such as physical sciences.
Previously, two DeepMind researchers won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on AlphaFold, a project that promises to support work such as drug research.
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The AI project is Jeff Bezos' latest ambition. Photo: Bloomberg . |
Many leaders and experts in the field of AI predict that large-scale language modeling (the systems behind chatbots like ChatGPT or Gemini) will soon achieve significant scientific breakthroughs.
OpenAI and Meta emphasize that their technologies are close to achieving this goal in fields such as mathematics and theoretical physics. Meanwhile, Periodic Labs and Project Prometheus aim to build AI models capable of learning in a more complex way than chatbots.
In terms of how it works, big language models learn by analyzing large amounts of text. Through data samples from Wikipedia articles, newspapers, or information gathered from the Internet, the system uses probability to predict how words will be combined in a way that resembles human speech. They can even write code or solve math problems.
In comparison, startups focus on training AI from the physical world . With $300 million in funding, Periodic Labs plans to build a laboratory in North Carolina (USA), where robots will conduct large-scale scientific experiments.
In theory, by analyzing physics experiments, AI systems can learn from mistakes, absorb information, and improve much of the scientific experiment. That is also the approach that Project Prometheus intends to take.
Source: https://znews.vn/du-an-moi-cua-jeff-bezos-post1603797.html
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