Jeff Bezos Creates A.I. Startup Where He Will Be Co-Chief Executive

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/17/technology/bezos-project-prometheus.html

54•dominikposmyk•2h ago

Comments

aschobel•1h ago

> 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

sionisrecur•1h ago

Is that a thing in the US? You start a company and there's no need to register it with the government? Or it gets registered but there's no public records of it?

nicole_express•1h ago

You can basically form a corporate entity with a nominal Delaware office, but it doesn't need to give any details about where the actual work takes place, yeah.

reactordev•1h ago

You can even LegalZoom one for $200.

Aurornis•1h ago

All companies are registered. They have to be registered to be legal entities, have bank accounts, and comply with tax laws.

Private companies don’t need to publicly divulge a lot, though. It’s between the company and their investors. It’s only once a company wants to trade publicly that they have to provide a lot of public details and financials.

trollbridge•56m ago

You don’t have to register a general partnership as long as it has one of the partners’ last name in the partnership name, although I guess you have to get an EIN to file partnership taxes.

A sole proprietorship doesn’t have to register anything ever at all.

Aurornis•17m ago

Great point. I suppose I should have said all companies like this (the corporation Bezos is involved with) are registered entities.

There are ways to do business activities yourself without registering an official business, though it’s generally discouraged because forming an LLC is so cheap and easy and provides some protections and benefits.

paxys•1h ago

There are thousands of companies registered every day across the US. This one is probably a subdivision of a subdivision of some holding company owned by Bezos. Pretty much impossible to track using just public data.

trollbridge•55m ago

In my state, zero information is given to the state about who the owners are.

SirFatty•34m ago

Let me guess: Texas?

freehorse•1h ago

$6.2 billion which are prob to be invested in amazon to be invested in the startup to be invested in amazon, so I would not assume such an amount actually implies the size where this would be surprising.

skeeter2020•20m ago

Q: could this be an "experiment" in AI financing? i.e. he's bankrolled 6.2B, then strategic quasi-purchases and cross investments will multiply that money without ever needing to spend it on anything - except AWS hosting of course

jordanb•1h ago

> Co-Chief Executive

In other words he wants to seagull manage the place.

elAhmo•57m ago

Wants all the power without actually doing the CEO's job. Quite ridiculous, similarly how there were two heads of "DOGE" or Twitter having Linda Yaccarino as the CEO.

davidw•53m ago

Prometheus? Eagles > seagulls...

nprateem•1h ago

Not many people can do the "Just-do-what-Musk-does" playbook, but this will no doubt be a good little bunse for him.

djtango•1h ago

If there were a founder I believed who could, it would be Jeff B

radial_symmetry•1h ago

The fact that Amazon hit it big twice under him (retail and then web services) speaks volumes. Hard to pretend he just got lucky.

baobabKoodaa•1h ago

So we now have one AI startup run by Jeff Bezos and another AI startup run by Beff Jezos. What a weird timeline.

reactordev•1h ago

Expect a third soon. Bezos really wants to have another hit.

epicureanideal•57m ago

I think it’s great that there will be more competition in the space, not to mention more hiring, etc.

googlywoogly•1h ago

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/

ares623•1h ago

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.

code_for_monkey•1h ago

next up he releases a memecoin

kilroy123•1h ago

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.

andsoitis•1h ago

It takes extraordinary skill to successfully juggle multiple ventures. So it is natural for some to want to take on the challenge. I think it is pretty impressive.

gedy•1h ago

Maybe he has this skill, but I also know a lot of folks who like to have the control and glory, but don't want to put in the time basically.

datadrivenangel•51m ago

And he's not juggling Blue Origin that well given the delays. Still impressive to go to space, so the man deserves credit, but it likely would have been several years faster and billions less if he had been more involved.

ramraj07•34m ago

By pure nature of how companies work, a space company with this mandate and so much funding, unless its being used for money laundering, will have a modicum of progress. BO has barely had that. No space company with so much money and so much runway has achieved so little.

andsoitis•1h ago

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.

johnnyApplePRNG•1h ago

I think it's actually going to be healthy for the ecosystem on the whole. The more competition, the better.

ACCount37•1h ago

If you believe that rushing capabilities ASAP is the right call, that is.

randycupertino•1h ago

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...

sva_•57m ago

Pretty gossipy

chemotaxis•57m ago

I don't want to be mean, but to be honest, your post makes me wonder if you are too distracted by the celebrity lifestyle (of others).

I don't have this treasure trove of information about Bezos' life and I don't think it makes me any less informed about the world?

randycupertino•22m ago

Haha.. busted. I do enjoy fashion blogs (specifically Tom and Lorenzo https://tomandlorenzo.com/) and always notice Bezos out galavanting around at the events they post!

NewsaHackO•53m ago

Being a celebrity doesn't sound like it would take that much time, especially for someone like him who probably just is physically present for things and leaves all planning to others. In fact, being coCEO is probably literally just more of the same to him.

3m•43m ago

You seem very up to date with all of the celebrity gossip.

googlywoogly•1h ago

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

awillen•1h ago

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.

davidw•25m ago

It depends on how much they're actually doing in the service of science, and how much is "flashy AI stuff".

I don't have a lot of hope that it's the former, to be honest. These people have burned up all their goodwill.

michaelbuckbee•1h ago

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.

afavour•1h ago

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.

surgical_fire•6m ago

> CEO

> actual work

Doesn't compute.

duxup•5m ago

Value I think is debatable. But most every CEO I have met is the workaholic type.

cosmotic•1m ago

Doing work isn't necesearily value, and value depends on perspective.

duxup•58s ago

Like I said, value is debatable.

rsynnott•1h ago

Is "A.I." NYT house style? Looks rather jarring.

palmotea•45m ago

> Is "A.I." NYT house style? Looks rather jarring.

I think their style is to use periods for acronyms, which I believe is traditional. A quick scan of their recent headlines turns up "U.S", "A.I.", "A.T.M.", "ICE", "L.P.G.A.", "REI", "U.K." I don't know what the reasoning behind the use of "ICE" and "REI" is, could be a mistake or a judgement that those words are tend to not be understood as acronyms, or something else.

Aeroi•1h ago

Jeff Bezos as a CO-CEO sounds like a corporate structure recipe for disaster.

ignoramous•57m ago

https://archive.is/ZhmTd

trollbridge•55m ago

Well, at least it won’t be a fake nonprofit… I hope.

outside1234•55m ago

He saw all of the grifting at OpenAI and said to himself: "I can do that!"

cjbarber•54m ago

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

laidoffamazon•41m ago

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

paxys•36m ago

> 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".

skeeter2020•22m ago

setting aside the AWS DB offerring I've done 2 "Project: Aurora" in the past 3 years, and a bonus project "Audite" (make sure you say it correctly when execs are around!)

Look, I'm all for "big bets" but when the majority of time and effort goes into the naming, kick-off and t-shirt design, this ain't it.

vxvrs•29m ago

I wonder what the dynamic between this and the Amazon Alexa team will look like, if there will be any in the first place...

doe88•16m ago

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.

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