Silicon Valley is intent on building “artificial general intelligence,” a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.
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 “artificial general engineer.”
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 improve the design and manufacture of practically any device, from computers to jet engines.
“All societal wealth is driven by invention,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “Six 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.”
“What Prometheus seeks to do,” he added, “is to offer a set of tools that dramatically accelerates that invention loop.”
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 robotics, drug design 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.
In 2024, Mr. Bezos invested in Physical Intelligence, 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 to create Periodic Labs, which hopes to accelerate discoveries in physics, chemistry and other areas.
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.
Mr. Bezos and Dr. Bajaj are in talks to raise an additional $100 billion 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.
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.
“Blue Origin is a perfect example of a company that could benefit from the tools that Prometheus is building,” Mr. Bezos said. “Any company that is building sophisticated devices — like rocket engines — would benefit greatly from this kind of technology.”
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.
“To design something that complicated takes a thousand human minds creatively working together,” Dr. Bajaj said. “It is one of the most complex things we do as a species.”
He added: “But they use tools that really haven’t 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.”
Mr. Bezos said he was spending a significant amount of time working on the company, which is based in San Francisco.
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’s X, a research effort inside the tech giant often called “the Moonshot Factory.” Google X created ambitious projects that have since become their own companies under the umbrella of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, including the drone delivery service Wing and the self-driving car company Waymo.
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.
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.
Mr. Bezos and Dr. Bajaj declined to reveal many details about how the company aims to build its new A.I. tools.
“You can’t build something like a jet engine with words alone — not even the words of mathematical equations,” Dr. Bajaj said. “It is about multidimensional forces and fields and how they are changing over time.”
Mr. Bezos put it more simply: “There are many years of grinding ahead of us to fulfill the vision we have.”