Jeff Bezos’ new artificial intelligence (AI) startup Project Prometheus reportedly acquired computer agent maker General Agents.
General Agents CEO Sherjil Ozair and a handful of colleagues from that company have joined Project Prometheus, Wired reported Wednesday (Nov. 26), citing corporate filings.
Ozair founded General Agents in 2024, and the company released its first technology in April: a computer agent called Ace that performs tasks based on the user’s prompts, according to the report.
General Agents’ website said the company’s mission is to “liberate humanity from digital labor.”
“Many routine tasks require only minimal cognitive effort, e.g. filling forms, copying and pasting information from one tool to another, or making and sending reports,” the site said. “Human workers continue to be responsible for many tedious tasks that artificial intelligence is already capable of performing.”
It is not known what Project Prometheus plans to do with Ace, the Wired report said.
Project Prometheus is working on AI systems for use in manufacturing, per the report.
The company’s LinkedIn page has the tagline, “AI for the physical economy.”
It was reported Nov. 17 that Bezos had launched Project Prometheus and will serve as co-CEO of the AI startup.
The firm launched with $6.2 billion in financing, some of it from Bezos, and has already hired nearly 100 employees, including researchers recruited from OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta, The New York Times reported.
The report noted that this is the first time Bezos has taken an official operational role in a company since leaving Amazon four years ago.
Joining Bezos as co-founder and co-CEO is Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who worked with Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin at Google’s X, the project that produced the drone delivery service Wing and the self-driving vehicle that became Waymo.
PYMNTS reported Nov. 18 that physical AI is emerging as the next stage of robotics. Advances in sensing, perception and large AI models give machines capabilities that traditional automation never supported, the report said.
In another development in this sector, Rerun said in March that it secured $17 million in seed funding to build out its database and cloud data platform purpose-built for physical AI data and workflows.
Also in March, Dexterity said it raised $95 million in additional funding to accelerate its development of physical AI to enhance productivity and address labor shortages.
Source: https://www.pymnts.com/