Jeff Bezos launched the startup Prometheus to create an "artificial engineer."

Startup Prometheus has raised $12 billion in a new funding round, bringing total investments to $18 billion with a valuation of $41 billion. Investors include Jeff Bezos himself, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, DST Global, and Arch Venture Partners.

The company's founders are Jeff Bezos and Vik Bajaj, who previously worked at Verily, Google's biotechnology division. Both hold the position of co-presidents. For Bezos, this is his first executive role since stepping down as CEO of Amazon in 2021.

Prometheus is not focused on chatbots or robots; its goal is to create a system capable of designing and bringing complex physical objects to production, ranging from jet engines and semiconductors to cars, spacecraft, and medical equipment. The company refers to such a system as an "artificial general engineer."

According to the founders, calculations that currently take hundreds of engineers 10 years to complete could be performed by a small team in just one year in the future.

The company notes that there is almost no data available to train such a system, requiring them to collect it independently. This is why a significant portion of the capital is directed toward computing power and gathering engineering data from the real world.

Prometheus currently has no ready-made product; the system is under development. Bezos did not specify timelines for the release of the first tools, stating only that "early versions will appear." The company employs around 150 people, with offices in San Francisco, London, and Zurich.

Source: The New York Times