Here's what Jeff Bezos' new startup Prometheus will do

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 specifics were scarce. Now, with a major new round of funding, Bezos and co-founder Vik Bajaj have talked about it in slightly more detail.

The funding round is significant—$12 billion now, after an initial round of $6.2 billion last year, for a valuation of $41 billion. The funding comes from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and others, plus a sizable amount from Bezos’ coffers. The startup currently employs 150 people.

Much of that funding will be put toward buying compute. “One of the reasons we’ve had to raise a significant amount of funding is because… what we’re doing is very compute-intensive and we need to create that data,” Bezos told CNBC.

So what exactly are they doing? Bezos summarized a significant portion of the company’s focus  as creating an “artificial general engineer.”

“All societal wealth is driven by invention,” Bezos told The New York Times. “Six thousand years ago, somebody invented the plow, and we all got wealthier. Then, much later, somebody invented the steam engine, and we all got wealthier.” He went on to say that “what Prometheus seeks to do is to offer a set of tools that dramatically accelerates that invention loop.”

Speaking to CNBC, he used the same examples but described the company’s goal in loftier terms. He said the objective is to produce technological breakthroughs that will produce “civilizational wealth,” not just wealth for a single individual or company.

Bajaj described the team’s goals in slightly more pragmatic terms. He said designing new technologies “takes a thousand human minds creatively working together” and is “one of the most complex things we do as a species.” He added that the engineers behind those breakthroughs “use tools that really haven’t changed for decades. Part of what we want to do is arm them with tools that allow them to come up with those designs much more quickly.”

A couple of months ago, The New York Times reported that Bezos and Bajaj are working to raise a $100 billion investment fund to go into companies that could leverage and benefit directly from what Prometheus may produce. That could include some of Bezos’ own other ventures, such as Blue Origin.

It’s still early for Prometheus, and no specific new products or technologies have been announced. Prometheus is not operating in a vacuum, either. There are numerous other startups exploring AI’s applications in the physical world, from training world models to drive policies for robotics, to overhauling manufacturing with more robust and capable automation. With this round, though, Prometheus has a significant funding advantage over most competitors.