Jeff Bezos’s Prometheus raises $12B to build an ‘artificial general engineer’ for the physical world

Prometheus, the carnal AI startup co-founded by Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, the erstwhile co-founder of Verily, Google’s beingness sciences unit, announced it raised $12 cardinal astatine a $41 cardinal valuation.

The caller funds came from Bezos himself, arsenic good arsenic from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock, among others.

This is the 2nd fundraise circular for Prometheus, which launched precocious past twelvemonth with an archetypal rise of $6.2 billion, according to CNBC.

Prometheus is gathering what it calls an “artificial wide engineer” — bundle susceptible of automating the plan and manufacturing of analyzable carnal systems, from pitchy engines to cause compounds.

The ambition is sweeping: regenerate ample swaths of engineering enactment with AI. Although the startup volition automate galore aspects of an engineer’s job, Bezos told CNBC that the productivity gains AI delivers volition pb to what helium calls “labor scarcity” — his word for a satellite wherever request for quality workers outpaces supply.

That puts him astatine likelihood with a fig of salient voices successful tech. While immoderate AI leaders foretell wide occupation losses, Bezos sees it differently.

“Significant productivity successful the system is going to rise the modular of living,” helium said. “People who contiguous person two-earner households, they’ll go one-earner households. Maybe immoderate radical who are moving overtime volition halt moving overtime.”

The company, which presently has 150 employees crossed offices successful San Francisco, London, and Zurich, is keeping the specifics of what it has already built nether wraps.

Bezos indicated that a ample information of the superior volition spell toward the company’s ample compute needs.

Bezos knows thing astir labour astatine scale. Amazon — wherever helium serves arsenic enforcement president and is the largest idiosyncratic shareholder — employs much than 1.5 cardinal radical worldwide and implicit the past year, nether CEO Andy Jassy, has laid disconnected tens of thousands of radical arsenic the institution has accelerated its ain automation push.

At $41 billion, Prometheus is 1 of the astir richly valued AI startups ever funded, and 1 of the largest azygous bets connected the carnal AI sector. But it isn’t the lone institution attracting monolithic capitalist interest. In caller months, task capitalists person progressively poured superior into carnal AI, a booming assemblage that investors and founders reason is inherently much defensible than axenic bundle — due to the fact that the carnal satellite creates moats that codification unsocial cannot.