{"id":70801,"date":"2026-06-11T19:26:35","date_gmt":"2026-06-11T19:26:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/70801\/"},"modified":"2026-06-11T19:26:35","modified_gmt":"2026-06-11T19:26:35","slug":"jeff-bezos-wants-to-build-an-artificial-general-engineer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/70801\/","title":{"rendered":"Jeff Bezos Wants to Build an \u2018Artificial General Engineer\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Silicon Valley is intent on building \u201c<a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/05\/16\/technology\/what-is-agi.html\" title=\"\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">artificial general intelligence<\/a>,\u201d a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">But Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has a more specific ambition. With his new start-up, Prometheus, he wants to build what he calls an \u201cartificial general engineer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Backed by more than $12 billion in funding, the company intends to create new engineering tools using many of the techniques used to build chatbots and other A.I. technologies. The hope is that these automated systems will <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/11\/17\/technology\/bezos-project-prometheus.html\" title=\"\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">improve the design and manufacture<\/a> of practically any device, from computers to jet engines.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">\u201cAll societal wealth is driven by invention,\u201d he said in an interview with The New York Times. \u201cSix 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">\u201cWhat Prometheus seeks to do,\u201d he added, \u201cis to offer a set of tools that dramatically accelerates that invention loop.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">The new start-up, which is valued at $29 billion and has about 150 employees, is among several well-funded efforts to apply A.I. to physical tasks, including <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/04\/04\/technology\/humanoid-robots-1x.html\" title=\"\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">robotics<\/a>, <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2021\/11\/04\/business\/google-alphabet-drug-discovery.html\" title=\"\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">drug design<\/a> and other scientific discovery. Much as online chatbots learned to write by analyzing enormous amounts of digital text, other A.I. systems can learn skills by pinpointing patterns in data collected from activities in the physical world.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">In 2024, Mr. Bezos invested in <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/11\/04\/business\/dealbook\/physical-intelligence-robot-ai.html\" title=\"\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Physical Intelligence<\/a>, a start-up founded by prominent researchers that is applying A.I. to robots. Last year, several researchers left Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other notable A.I. projects <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2025\/09\/30\/technology\/ai-meta-google-openai-periodic.html\" title=\"\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">to create Periodic Labs<\/a>, which hopes to accelerate discoveries in physics, chemistry and other areas.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">With Prometheus, Mr. Bezos and his co-chief executive, Vik Bajaj, aim to do something even more ambitious. They want to improve the efficiency of companies that design and build computers, automobiles, spacecraft and other physical products.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Mr. Bezos and Dr. Bajaj are in talks to <a class=\"css-yywogo\" href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/03\/19\/technology\/jeff-bezos-ai-fund-project-prometheus.html\" title=\"\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">raise an additional $100 billion<\/a> for an investment fund that Prometheus would control, three people familiar with the talks said. The fund could invest in or even buy companies that can benefit from the technology under development at Prometheus.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">The new A.I. start-up could support other companies backed by Mr. Bezos, including his rocket company, Blue Origin. David Limp, the former Amazon executive who leads Blue Origin, is a member of the Prometheus board of directors.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">\u201cBlue Origin is a perfect example of a company that could benefit from the tools that Prometheus is building,\u201d Mr. Bezos said. \u201cAny company that is building sophisticated devices \u2014 like rocket engines \u2014 would benefit greatly from this kind of technology.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Today, companies often need a decade to design and manufacture a new jet engine, Dr. Bajaj said. His hope is that Prometheus can significantly reduce that time.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">\u201cTo design something that complicated takes a thousand human minds creatively working together,\u201d Dr. Bajaj said. \u201cIt is one of the most complex things we do as a species.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">He added: \u201cBut they use tools that really haven\u2019t 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.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Mr. Bezos said he was spending a significant amount of time working on the company, which is based in San Francisco.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Dr. Bajaj is a trained scientist with significant experience in industry. After studying as a physicist and a chemist, he worked closely with the Google co-founder Sergey Brin at Google\u2019s X, a research effort inside the tech giant often called \u201cthe Moonshot Factory.\u201d Google X created ambitious projects that have since become their own companies under the umbrella of Google\u2019s parent company, Alphabet, including the drone delivery service Wing and the self-driving car company Waymo.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">In 2015, Dr. Bajaj helped found Verily, a research lab that focuses on the life sciences. Like Waymo and Wing, Verily is operated by Alphabet.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">He later co-founded and served as chief executive of Foresite Labs, an effort to create A.I. and data science start-ups. He left that job to focus on Prometheus.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Mr. Bezos and Dr. Bajaj declined to reveal many details about how the company aims to build its new A.I. tools.<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">\u201cYou can\u2019t build something like a jet engine with words alone \u2014 not even the words of mathematical equations,\u201d Dr. Bajaj said. \u201cIt is about multidimensional forces and fields and how they are changing over time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"css-140ip4z e1me5xab0\">Mr. Bezos put it more simply: \u201cThere are many years of grinding ahead of us to fulfill the vision we have.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Silicon Valley is intent on building \u201cartificial general intelligence,\u201d a machine that can do anything the human brain&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70802,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6744,145,3013,25,39205,39178,5252,1555,684,39204,28248,1585,39206],"class_list":["post-70801","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agi","tag-agi","tag-amazon-com-inc","tag-artificial-general-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-bajaj","tag-bezos","tag-blue-origin","tag-computers-and-the-internet","tag-innovation","tag-jeffrey-p","tag-project-prometheus","tag-start-ups","tag-vikas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70801","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70801"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70801\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70801"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70801"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70801"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}