For the first time since stepping down as Amazon’s CEO, Jeff Bezos is running a company again. His new venture, Prometheus, has just completed a $12 billion funding round that valued the company at roughly $41 billion. The company’s goal is to build a so-called artificial general engineer—a suite of tools that will enable human engineers to design and manufacture complex physical objects faster and more easily.
Bezos discussed the project in greater detail for the first time in an exclusive interview with David Faber of CNBC. He also immediately set the record straight on a few rumors that had accumulated around Prometheus.
So what will Prometheus focus on?
Imagine software capable of accomplishing in a single afternoon what currently takes an engineer weeks. That is roughly how Bezos describes what Prometheus is building. He speaks of a “very, very modern version” of programs such as CAD, or computer-aided design tools. But he immediately adds that this is a gross oversimplification of the whole endeavor.
“This is an age-old dream,” Bezos said. “The idea that you could build a suite of tools capable of actually doing engineering work—an artificial general engineer. People have dreamed about this for decades, but it was never truly possible. Now it is, and that is exactly what we have been working on since late 2024.” The company wants to shorten what Bezos calls the “invention loop.” According to him, this would allow smaller teams to accomplish much bigger things in much less time. “Our goal is to empower engineers and make invention easier and faster,” he explained.
Where could such tools be useful? Bezos mentions robotics, drug design, and manufacturing in general. And he cannot resist offering an example from his own field. “Blue Origin is a perfect example of a company that could benefit from Prometheus’s tools,” he told The New York Times. “Any company that builds complex equipment, such as rocket engines, would benefit enormously from this technology.”
What Prometheus definitely does not do
There had long been speculation that the company was building robots, but Bezos dismissed it outright. “There was a little speculation,” he acknowledged. “We said to ourselves, look, we’re not hiding anything. We’re just keeping our heads down and trying to get the work done. But when you raise that much money, people start getting curious.” Prometheus is therefore not building any machines. It is creating artificial intelligence for invention and physical engineering. Bezos also admitted that it is still too early to reveal exactly what the company has achieved. “It’s truly remarkable,” he said, but offered no further details.
Why such a large investment? The answer is computing power. A large portion of the fresh funding will go toward exactly that. “That’s a big chunk of the capital we raised,” Bezos said. “One of the reasons we had to raise such a significant sum is that our work is extremely compute-intensive, and we need to generate that data.”
The company is already recruiting talented people from names such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Nvidia. It employs roughly 150 people, split among offices in San Francisco, London, and Zurich, Switzerland. The slogan on the company’s profile reads: “AI for the physical economy.”
Bezos: AI pessimists are wrong
Here, Bezos pushed back against a trend that is currently causing considerable concern in Silicon Valley. While the public fears that artificial intelligence will put people out of work, he argues the exact opposite. He even expects a labor shortage. “They have a pessimistic view because many smart people are telling them to be pessimistic. But those people are wrong,” he declared.
What does he mean? According to him, AI will significantly boost productivity across the entire economy. That will improve living standards and expand the “basket of goods people can afford.” The result could be interesting. Households in which two people currently earn an income might eventually be able to rely on just one. “A lot of people who today have, say, a two-income household may decide that one of them won’t enter the workforce, so they’ll become a single-income household,” Bezos said. “Maybe some people who currently work overtime will stop because they won’t want the overtime.”
Bezos takes a balanced stance on AI oversight. He believes we need “sensible” rules, but warns against an approach that would stifle development. He cited pharmaceuticals and aviation as examples of sensible oversight. “There’s a lot to be said for sound government oversight that improves safety and products,” he said. “But when you do that, you want to address it at the application level. You don’t want to accidentally ban a knife just because it can be misused.” He continued: “Knives are important tools, and yes, every now and then someone misuses one. But the solution isn’t to say: all right, no more data centers, no more knives. That isn’t a smart approach.”
Running a company again
Prometheus is the first formal executive role Bezos has held since stepping down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021. Interestingly, this puts him against the current trend. Several leaders of major companies have stepped down over the past year, specifically citing the rise of artificial intelligence. They argued that someone else should lead the transition into the new era.
Former Walmart CEO Doug McMillon described it this way to CNBC in December: “With everything happening around AI, I could start this next major series of transformations, but I wouldn’t finish it.” Bezos sees things differently. “I started in late 2024 with Vik as an investor in Prometheus,” he said. “And as I saw what we were doing, I was so impressed by what was happening and by the potential that I decided I couldn’t sit on the sidelines and had to jump in headfirst. So here I am.”
By Vik, he means Vik Bajaj, the company’s co-founder and co-CEO. Bajaj is an adjunct professor of radiology at Stanford University School of Medicine and previously co-founded Verily, a life sciences research lab launched by Alphabet. According to Bezos, the two executives do not divide up the work. “We talk many times a day. We’re both involved in every decision,” he explained. “It’s not like, OK, you take care of this half of the company and I’ll take care of that half. We stick together. We’re both generalists.”
What is it like to run a company again after sixty-five months away from the CEO’s chair? The 62-year-old billionaire has a term for it. “Type 2 fun,” he says. “That’s the kind of fun where, after you climb a mountain, you say to yourself: hey, climbing that mountain was fun.” He adds: “It’s hard work, but it’s good hard work.”
Bezos is not idle elsewhere, either. He runs the space company Blue Origin and remains executive chairman of Amazon. But the common thread tying up most of his time these days is artificial intelligence. “Prometheus takes up most of my time,” he confirmed. “I also spend a lot of time at Blue. I devote a lot of time to AI at Amazon.”
A shadow over Blue Origin
Bezos also had to discuss Blue Origin in a less pleasant context. Last month, one of its New Glenn rockets exploded during a static-fire test at the Space Force base in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket was secured to the launch pad, and its engines were ignited to verify their functionality ahead of a planned launch. But the test did not go according to plan, and the rocket exploded.
“It was a very difficult event, a very bad day for Blue Origin, and very challenging for the entire team,” Bezos said. According to him, the company “was lucky in several respects,” including the fact that the explosion did not damage the components with the longest lead times. Despite this, the schedule remains on track. “Before this year is over, we’ll be flying again,” he promised.
Bezos is open but cautious about potentially connecting his companies. He said he could easily imagine Prometheus becoming a customer of Amazon’s AWS cloud division once it needs more computing capacity. According to him, however, the two companies will remain “at arm’s length” from each other. “We get compute from many sources,” he said. “Right now, compute is scarce enough that you take it wherever you can get it.” Bajaj simply added: “Including AWS.”
