Prometheus, considered one of Jeff Bezos’ latest ventures, introduced a $12 billion funding spherical on Thursday that values the corporate at $41 billion.
The unreal intelligence startup launched in November with $6.2 billion in funding.
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, serves as co-CEO alongside Vik Bajaj, a professor at Stanford College’s College of Drugs who beforehand co-founded Alphabet’s Verily, a analysis lab devoted to life sciences.
CBC’s David Faber spoke with Bezos and Bajaj solely from Prometheus headquarters in San Francisco on Thursday.
Key moments from the unique interview:
In his first time talking at size concerning the startup, Bezos revealed that Prometheus is creating a set of AI instruments to assist engineers design and manufacture bodily merchandise simpler and quicker. He mentioned it is nonetheless “untimely” to reveal what Prometheus has achieved to date, “however it’s actually fairly exceptional.”
The most recent funding spherical will assist Prometheus purchase extra compute, Bezos mentioned.
“That may be a huge chunk of the funding we have raised,” he mentioned. “And one of many causes we have needed to elevate a big quantity of funding is as a result of … what we’re doing could be very compute intensive and we have to, you already know, create that knowledge.”
Prometheus is targeted on constructing AI fashions for bodily duties, together with engineering, manufacturing and drug design. The startup has remained tight-lipped about its preliminary merchandise, and it has been busy recruiting expertise from corporations together with OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Nvidia.
