Jeff Bezos is in early discussions with investors in the Middle East and Southeast Asia to raise as much as $100 billion for an investment fund that would operate alongside his new artificial intelligence start-up, Project Prometheus, according to three people familiar with the talks.<\/p>\n
The fund could be among the world\u2019s largest, matching the $100 billion Vision Fund managed by the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank, which is focused on investment in new technologies.<\/p>\n
Mr. Bezos\u2019 fund would invest in or even purchase companies that could benefit from the technology under development at Project Prometheus, which is working on A.I. to improve engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields<\/a>, including computing and aerospace.<\/p>\n Started by Mr. Bezos, the founder of Amazon, and Vik Bajaj, a former Google researcher, Project Prometheus has raised $6.2 billion from Mr. Bezos himself and others.<\/p>\n His investment fund would be part of the same holding company as the start-up, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to discuss it publicly.<\/p>\n Some details related to the new fund were reported earlier by The Financial Times<\/a> and The Wall Street Journal<\/a>.<\/p>\n Mr. Bezos said<\/a> in a conference in Italy in October that A.I.\u2019s biggest impact was going to be how it would affect every company in the world, including manufacturers. \u201cIt is going to make their quality go up and their productivity go up,\u201d he said. \u201cI mean by every company I literally mean every company.\u201d<\/p>\n Project Prometheus is among several new efforts to apply A.I. to physical tasks, including robotics<\/a>, drug design<\/a>, scientific discovery, engineering and manufacturing. Much as OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT chatbot learned to write by analyzing vast amounts of digital text, other A.I. systems can learn skills by pinpointing patterns in data collected from physical experience and behavior.<\/p>\n In 2024, Mr. Bezos invested in Physical Intelligence<\/a>, a start-up that is applying A.I. to robots. Last year, several researchers left Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other prominent A.I. projects to create Periodic Labs<\/a>, which aims to accelerate discoveries in physics, chemistry and other areas.<\/p>\n With Mr. Bezos and Dr. Bajaj serving as co-chief executives, Project Prometheus hopes to improve the efficiency of companies that design and build computers, automobiles, spacecraft and other physical products. Mr. Bezos\u2019 new fund would invest in such companies.<\/p>\n His new A.I. start-up could also help Mr. Bezos\u2019 existing investments, such as his rocket company, Blue Origin. David Limp, the former Amazon executive who leads Blue Origin, has been appointed to the Project Prometheus board of directors.<\/p>\n Dr. Bajaj is a physicist and chemist who worked closely with the Google co-founder Sergey Brin at Google\u2019s X, a research effort nicknamed \u201cThe Moonshot Factory.\u201d Google X incubated a wide range of ambitious projects, including the drone delivery service Wing and the self-driving car company Waymo.<\/p>\n In 2015, Dr. Bajaj was among the founders of Verily, a research lab dedicated to the life sciences. Like Waymo and Wing, Verily is operated by Google\u2019s parent company, Alphabet.<\/p>\n Dr. Bajaj 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 Project Prometheus.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jeff Bezos is in early discussions with investors in the Middle East and Southeast Asia to raise as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":44797,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[161],"tags":[552,28385,8773,24252,28384,27803,734,28285,4055,2082,28386],"class_list":{"0":"post-44796","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jeff-bezos","8":"tag-artificial-intelligence","9":"tag-bajaj","10":"tag-bezos","11":"tag-computers-and-the-internet","12":"tag-engineering-and-engineers","13":"tag-factories-and-manufacturing","14":"tag-jeff-bezos","15":"tag-jeffrey-p","16":"tag-project-prometheus","17":"tag-venture-capital","18":"tag-vik-1977"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116471460173629363","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}