Here's what Jeff Bezos' new startup Prometheus will do
In November, Jeff Bezos announced that he would become co-CEO of a new startup called Prometheus. At the time, the startup said it would focus on "physical AI"-an increasingly common term for applying the same deep learning principles behind large language models or generative AI to things like robotics and manufacturing-but specifics were scarce. Now, with a major new round of funding, Bezos and co-founder Vik Bajaj have talked about it in slightly more detail.
The funding round is significant-$12 billion now, after an initial round of $6.2 billion last year, for a valuation of $41 billion. The funding comes from JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, and others, plus a sizable amount from Bezos' coffers. The startup currently employs 150 people.
Much of that funding will be put toward buying compute. "One of the reasons we've had to raise a significant amount of funding is because... what we're doing is very compute-intensive and we need to create that data," Bezos told CNBC.