Jeff Bezos wants to build an ‘artificial general engineer’

Silicon Valley intends to build “artificial general intelligence,” a machine that can do everything a human brain can do.

But Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has more specific ambitions. With his new start-up, Prometheus, he wants to build what he calls an “artificial general engineer”.

Backed by more than $12 billion, the company intends to create new engineering tools using many of the techniques used to create chatbots and other artificial intelligence technologies. We hope that these automated systems will improve the design and manufacture of virtually any device, from computers to jet engines.

“All social wealth is driven by invention,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “Six thousand years ago someone invented the plow and we all got rich. Then, much later, someone invented the steam engine and we all got rich.”

“What Prometheus is trying to do,” he added, “is offer a set of tools that will dramatically accelerate that invention loop.”

The new startup, which is valued at $29 billion and has about 150 employees, is among several well-funded efforts to apply artificial intelligence to physical tasks, including robotics, drug design and other scientific discoveries. Just as online chatbots learned to write by analyzing vast amounts of digital text, other AI systems can learn skills by identifying patterns in data collected from activities in the physical world.

In 2024, Mr. Bezos invested in Physical Intelligence, a start-up founded by leading researchers that applies artificial intelligence to robots. Last year, several researchers left Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other major AI projects to form Periodic Labs, which they hope will accelerate discoveries in physics, chemistry and other fields.

With Prometheus, Mr. Bezos and his co-CEO Vik Bajaj are trying to do something even more ambitious. They want to improve the efficiency of companies that design and manufacture computers, cars, spaceships and other physical products.

Mr. Bezos and Dr. Bajaj is in talks to raise an additional $100 billion for an investment fund that would control Prometheus, three people familiar with the talks said. The fund could invest in or even buy companies that can benefit from the technology being developed at Prometheus.

The new AI start-up could support other companies backed by Mr Bezos, including his rocket company Blue Origin. David Limp, the former Amazon executive who runs Blue Origin, is a board member of Prometheus.

“Blue Origin is a perfect example of a company that could benefit from the tools that Prometheus is making,” Mr. Bezos said. “Any company that makes sophisticated devices — like rocket engines — would benefit greatly from this kind of technology.”

Today, companies often need ten years to design and manufacture a new jet engine, said Dr. Bajaj. His hope is that Prometheus can significantly reduce that time.

“Designing something that complicated requires a thousand human minds working creatively together,” said Dr. Bajaj. “It’s one of the most complex things we do as a species.”

He added: “But they’re using tools that haven’t really changed in decades. Part of what we want to do is arm them with tools that allow them to come up with these designs much faster.”

Mr. Bezos said he spends a significant amount of time working at the company, which is based in San Francisco.

Dr. Bajaj is a trained scientist with significant industry experience. After studying physics and chemistry, he worked closely with Google co-founder Sergey Brin at Google’s X, a research effort within the tech giant often called the “Moonshot Factory.” Google X spawned ambitious projects that have since become their own companies under Google’s parent company, Alphabet, including drone delivery service Wing and self-driving company Waymo.

In 2015, Dr. Bajaj founded Verily, a research laboratory that focuses on life sciences. Like Waymo and Wing, Verily is operated by Alphabet.

He later co-founded and served as CEO of Foresite Labs, a company that sought to create artificial intelligence and data science startups. He left that job to focus on Prometheus.

Mr. Bezos and Dr. Bajaj declined to reveal many details about how the company plans to build its new AI tools.

“You can’t build something like a jet engine with just words — not even the words of mathematical equations,” said Dr. Bajaj. “It’s about multidimensional forces and fields and how they change over time.”

Mr. Bezos put it more simply: “We have many years of grinding ahead of us to fulfill the vision that we have.”