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> The new company has until now kept a low profile, and when it was started is not even clear.

Any more details? Where is it located? Who is working there,

For $6.2 billion raised I’m surprised their aren’t more details

based on linkedin it looks like they took a failed company thats existed for a year "General agents" which had what just looked like a single browser agent and now have rebranded that.
> Co-Chief Executive

In other words he wants to seagull manage the place.

"I bring the money, so I have the last word on everything. Now talk."
Not many people can do the "Just-do-what-Musk-does" playbook, but this will no doubt be a good little bunse for him.
So we now have one AI startup run by Jeff Bezos and another AI startup run by Beff Jezos. What a weird timeline.
In the fires of Mount Doom, a 6th frontier lab was secretly forged. For none could resist being a CEO of an AI startup before the music stops.
Honestly, why? Why not just focus on Blue Origin?

I don't get this new Musk-like tendency to run multiple ventures instead of focusing on one very tough mission.

It’s free money. You spend 3billion and have more billions drop in from investors. You get to create great tech and then make 100s more billions drop from IPO. When the initial investment is a rounding error in your portfolio, it’s a crime to not do this
From the TechCrunch article;

> its work will resemble that of Periodic Labs, which is building technology to speed up scientific research by simulating the physical world to train AI models.

Will be interesting to see how far simulation gets you vs actual embodiment via robots, etc.

I think it's actually going to be healthy for the ecosystem on the whole. The more competition, the better.
I feel like he's too distracted by his celebrity lifestyle these days to really focus on running a company.

He just paid for Kris Jenner's 70th birthday party at his house where they had the cops called on them: https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/kris-jenn...

and he disinvited Elon Musk (lol): https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/elon-...

Here he is out showboating at the Oscars, Vanity Fair parties, the white house, in Hollywood, in Monaco, Paris Fashion Week, Sun Valley, Milan, NYC, various galas all in the last year: https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-fa...

Amazon itself has become so corrupted and disfunctional that all of their internal AI efforts amount to just burning billions for bottom-of-the-barrel results[0]. I'm not surprised that 5 person startups are building better AI products than all of Amazon, or that Bezos decided to start an AI company outside of Amazon.

[0]https://labs.amazon.science/

A lot of negative posts here, but AI to advance science seems like basically the best possible use case. The more ultrawealthy people who want to throw billions at it, the better.
Wasn't OpenAI also for the embetterment of society? Looking at how things went for all high profile AI companies, why should we trust this one? Even if they got a saint to run as CEO they would find a way to screw humanity over.
Notably, Amazon has already invested $8 billion in Anthropic/Claude, so I'm hoping this is actually something wildly different and with a different approach.
Co-CEO. So he gets to boast about being CEO of an AI company at dinner parties while leaving someone else to do the actual work.
Is "A.I." NYT house style? Looks rather jarring.
Jeff Bezos as a CO-CEO sounds like a corporate structure recipe for disaster.
How do they break ties?
It’s pretty common sentiment with senior level Amazonians that Uncle Jeff was a great leader. Many lament his departure and loathe his replacement.

Lifestyle distractions aside, Bezos playing any kind of CEO role is probably a good thing.

Well, at least it won’t be a fake nonprofit… I hope.
He saw all of the grifting at OpenAI and said to himself: "I can do that!"
I don't get the downvotes. This is a case of the simplest explanation being the most likely one.
Recap for those before the paywall:

New AI co, Bezos as co-CEO (alongside Vik Bajaj, ex-Google X)

$6.2b in funding

Nearly 100 employees

AI + real world scientific experiments, for the engineering and manufacturing of computers, automobiles and spacecraft

In what world is that still a startup!?

I thought startup was supposed to mean "we're still starting up our business", but it sounds like the meaning these days is closer to "we are setting piles of cash on fire".

I have a weird sense that this is a way to get his kids that are technical into a family business without having them work at a company that isn't considered prestigious
> Called Project Prometheus

What is it about tech people and being unable to come up with original names?

Every company I have worked for has had two dozen internal tools and projects called "Prometheus".

I wonder what the dynamic between this and the Amazon Alexa team will look like, if there will be any in the first place...
Despite the critiques that is something worthwhile I can understand, maybe there is a time in your life you want to be involved in something big, but not 100% like you were at your prime you have the opportunity to do it, so why not. You remain engaged. I prefer seeing that than doing nothing of something useless.
I think that’s a very mature, realistic take. Personally, if I was a 60 year old billionaire, I’d probably be having a series of long vacations or chilling in my yacht. It’s cool that bezos is still trying.
Maybe you wouldn't. Maybe you'd find it difficult to walk away from the lifestyle that made you a billionaire in the first place.
Maybe! I certainly hope so. But if my life thus far is any indication, I do enjoy working hard but also have to fight _really_ hard to not slip into laziness, even though it makes me less happy. Something about the delayed gratification of doing hard things -- there is a ton of gratification, but my monkey brain hates the delay.