> The new company has until now kept a low profile, and when it was started is not even clear.
Any more details? Where is it located? Who is working there,
For $6.2 billion raised I’m surprised their aren’t more details
$6.2 billion which are prob to be invested in amazon to be invested in the startup to be invested in amazon, so I would not assume such an amount actually implies the size where this would be surprising.
Is that a thing in the US? You start a company and there's no need to register it with the government? Or it gets registered but there's no public records of it?
All companies are registered. They have to be registered to be legal entities, have bank accounts, and comply with tax laws.
Private companies don’t need to publicly divulge a lot, though. It’s between the company and their investors. It’s only once a company wants to trade publicly that they have to provide a lot of public details and financials.
You don’t have to register a general partnership as long as it has one of the partners’ last name in the partnership name, although I guess you have to get an EIN to file partnership taxes.
A sole proprietorship doesn’t have to register anything ever at all.
Great point. I suppose I should have said all companies like this (the corporation Bezos is involved with) are registered entities.
There are ways to do business activities yourself without registering an official business, though it’s generally discouraged because forming an LLC is so cheap and easy and provides some protections and benefits.
You can basically form a corporate entity with a nominal Delaware office, but it doesn't need to give any details about where the actual work takes place, yeah.
You can even LegalZoom one for $200.
There are thousands of companies registered every day across the US. This one is probably a subdivision of a subdivision of some holding company owned by Bezos. Pretty much impossible to track using just public data.
In my state, zero information is given to the state about who the owners are.
Let me guess: Texas?
Nope. TX actually has quite a bit more transparency.
One of the more absurd things I can do is have two LLCs own each other, and then have outside management.
Wyoming?
Q: could this be an "experiment" in AI financing? i.e. he's bankrolled 6.2B, then strategic quasi-purchases and cross investments will multiply that money without ever needing to spend it on anything - except AWS hosting of course
From the TechCrunch article;
> its work will resemble that of Periodic Labs, which is building technology to speed up scientific research by simulating the physical world to train AI models.
Will be interesting to see how far simulation gets you vs actual embodiment via robots, etc.
Notably, Amazon has already invested $8 billion in Anthropic/Claude, so I'm hoping this is actually something wildly different and with a different approach.
Despite the critiques that is something worthwhile I can understand, maybe there is a time in your life you want to be involved in something big, but not 100% like you were at your prime you have the opportunity to do it, so why not. You remain engaged. I prefer seeing that than doing nothing of something useless.
At this point I prefer these big tech CEOs just be involved in whatever is least damaging to society.
Everyone knows that the best companies have two CEOs.
> Called Project Prometheus
What is it about tech people and being unable to come up with original names?
Every company I have worked for has had two dozen internal tools and projects called "Prometheus".
setting aside the AWS DB offerring I've done 2 "Project: Aurora" in the past 3 years, and a bonus project "Audite" (make sure you say it correctly when execs are around!)
Look, I'm all for "big bets" but when the majority of time and effort goes into the naming, kick-off and t-shirt design, this ain't it.
Is "A.I." NYT house style? Looks rather jarring.
> Is "A.I." NYT house style? Looks rather jarring.
I think their style is to use periods for acronyms, which I believe is traditional. A quick scan of their recent headlines turns up "U.S", "A.I.", "A.T.M.", "ICE", "L.P.G.A.", "REI", "U.K." I don't know what the reasoning behind the use of "ICE" and "REI" is, could be a mistake or a judgement that those words are tend to not be understood as acronyms, or something else.
IIRC they used to always style "NASA" as "N.A.S.A." even though the agency itself never uses periods and is of course always pronounced as a word rather than initials. (This particular example stuck in my mind just because I work there). Hopefully "ICE" and "REI" reflect a change in that style to omit periods when referring to organizations that omit the periods in their own style guides.
Well, at least it won’t be a fake nonprofit… I hope.
I wonder what the dynamic between this and the Amazon Alexa team will look like, if there will be any in the first place...
A lot of negative posts here, but AI to advance science seems like basically the best possible use case. The more ultrawealthy people who want to throw billions at it, the better.
It depends on how much they're actually doing in the service of science, and how much is "flashy AI stuff".
I don't have a lot of hope that it's the former, to be honest. These people have burned up all their goodwill.
Honestly, why? Why not just focus on Blue Origin?
I don't get this new Musk-like tendency to run multiple ventures instead of focusing on one very tough mission.
It takes extraordinary skill to successfully juggle multiple ventures. So it is natural for some to want to take on the challenge. I think it is pretty impressive.
And he's not juggling Blue Origin that well given the delays. Still impressive to go to space, so the man deserves credit, but it likely would have been several years faster and billions less if he had been more involved.
By pure nature of how companies work, a space company with this mandate and so much funding, unless its being used for money laundering, will have a modicum of progress. BO has barely had that. No space company with so much money and so much runway has achieved so little.
> It takes extraordinary skill to successfully juggle multiple ventures.
That's a myth. I've done that, and I know a lot of people who do that. Do you think Musk is writing sparse attention code for Grok? Does he even know how Grok's architecture works under the hood? Or that he designed the data centers? I mean, you delegate stuff. The only hard thing is getting the right people, but if you're a hyped up billionaire, it's easy mode because you can pay a lot, and people want to work for you. You just create an environment where they can achieve things.
There are times when the majority of your work is simply attending public meetings, podcasts, and doing interviews. People really overestimate what's involved in the work of a billionaire CEO. The people actually making things happen in space industry or AI work harder, longer, and solve more complex problems than any CEO and in some cases they need to work hard against the CEOs to actually make things happen.
> if you're a hyped up billionaire, it's easy mode because you can pay a lot, and people want to work for you
blue origin vs spacex says otherwise..
Maybe he has this skill, but I also know a lot of folks who like to have the control and glory, but don't want to put in the time basically.
In the old days there was a saying "The only way Bill Gates could spend all his fortune is a manned mission to Mars."
Well, Bezos and Musk are trying that, and it turns out there is still a lot left to spend, so instead of helping the needy they do what is trendy for billionaires, which is build another AI company.
Recap for those before the paywall:
New AI co, Bezos as co-CEO (alongside Vik Bajaj, ex-Google X)
$6.2b in funding
Nearly 100 employees
AI + real world scientific experiments, for the engineering and manufacturing of computers, automobiles and spacecraft
I have a weird sense that this is a way to get his kids that are technical into a family business without having them work at a company that isn't considered prestigious
Jeff Bezos as a CO-CEO sounds like a corporate structure recipe for disaster.
next up he releases a memecoin
He saw all of the grifting at OpenAI and said to himself: "I can do that!"
In the fires of Mount Doom, a 6th frontier lab was secretly forged. For none could resist being a CEO of an AI startup before the music stops.
Openai, deepmind, anthropic, xai. who is the fifth frontier lab?
When you’re rich, you can even buy vanity CEO roles.
YAAS (Yet Another AI Startup). Yawn.
> Co-Chief Executive
In other words he wants to seagull manage the place.
Wants all the power without actually doing the CEO's job. Quite ridiculous, similarly how there were two heads of "DOGE" or Twitter having Linda Yaccarino as the CEO.
Linda had an important role as the Chief Bag Holder in case things went bad.
Prometheus? Eagles > seagulls...
Co-CEO. So he gets to boast about being CEO of an AI company at dinner parties while leaving someone else to do the actual work.
> CEO
> actual work
Doesn't compute.
Value I think is debatable. But most every CEO I have met is the workaholic type.
I’ve met both. Even when I disagree with them I appreciate the ones that actually put the work in. Most recently I’ve worked with a string of them that barely understand how their companies make money and certainly couldn’t do any of the actual jobs there. Performance is independent from them being on the payroll.
Doing work isn't necesearily value, and value depends on perspective.
Like I said, value is debatable.
The Amazon Prime Video approach
- [deleted]
Not many people can do the "Just-do-what-Musk-does" playbook, but this will no doubt be a good little bunse for him.
If there were a founder I believed who could, it would be Jeff B
The fact that Amazon hit it big twice under him (retail and then web services) speaks volumes. Hard to pretend he just got lucky.
So we now have one AI startup run by Jeff Bezos and another AI startup run by Beff Jezos. What a weird timeline.
Amazon itself has become so corrupted and disfunctional that all of their internal AI efforts amount to just burning billions for bottom-of-the-barrel results[0]. I'm not surprised that 5 person startups are building better AI products than all of Amazon, or that Bezos decided to start an AI company outside of Amazon.
Expect a third soon. Bezos really wants to have another hit.
I think it’s great that there will be more competition in the space, not to mention more hiring, etc.
I think it's actually going to be healthy for the ecosystem on the whole. The more competition, the better.
If you believe that rushing capabilities ASAP is the right call, that is.
I feel like he's too distracted by his celebrity lifestyle these days to really focus on running a company.
He just paid for Kris Jenner's 70th birthday party at his house where they had the cops called on them: https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/kris-jenn...
and he disinvited Elon Musk (lol): https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/elon-...
Here he is out showboating at the Oscars, Vanity Fair parties, the white house, in Hollywood, in Monaco, Paris Fashion Week, Sun Valley, Milan, NYC, various galas all in the last year: https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-fa...
I don't want to be mean, but to be honest, your post makes me wonder if you are too distracted by the celebrity lifestyle (of others).
I don't have this treasure trove of information about Bezos' life and I don't think it makes me any less informed about the world?
Haha.. busted. I do enjoy fashion blogs (specifically Tom and Lorenzo https://tomandlorenzo.com/) and always notice Bezos out galavanting around at the events they post!
Being a celebrity doesn't sound like it would take that much time, especially for someone like him who probably just is physically present for things and leaves all planning to others. In fact, being coCEO is probably literally just more of the same to him.
You seem very up to date with all of the celebrity gossip.
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Pretty gossipy
Amazon itself has become so corrupted and disfunctional that all of their internal AI efforts amount to just burning billions for bottom-of-the-barrel results[0]. I'm not surprised that 5 person startups are building better AI products than all of Amazon, or that Bezos decided to start an AI company outside of Amazon.