Jeff Bezos’ new AI venture has quietly bought an agent computing startup
After the New York Times story broke, Goss, Osair and about three dozen others updated their LinkedIn profiles to list their affiliation with Bezos’ investment. Some of these people also work in the Foresite lab.
Details about Prometheus are limited. Its founding date, official name, and headquarters are not publicly known. But a dinner hosted by Bajaj in June offered other clues.
Their updated LinkedIn profiles show that at least two other guests that night, including former Nvidia senior research scientist Kamiar Azizzadeh Shelley, quietly joined Prometheus earlier this year.
Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit, two former Google researchers who authored a famous artificial intelligence paper, ended up not being able to attend the dinner. But both are now consultants to Prometheus while running their own startups, according to LinkedIn data and a person familiar with the matter. None of the researchers responded to requests for comment.
Built for speed
Ozair founded General Agents last year, and the San Francisco startup released its first technology last April. Described as “a real-time computer pilot,” Ace takes over a computer and takes actions based on the user’s requests. It’s part of a class of tools the AI industry calls computer agents, which can automate daily tasks on a laptop running between different programs.
A demo video of the launch shows Ace downloading an image from Google and sending it to someone via iMessage in less than 15 seconds.
How Ace fits into Prometheus’ plans is still unclear. According to general information from General Agents, the new versions of Ace will be released by this month. The company’s website and job postings remain online, and a team leader in India who helps train Ace has also joined Prometheus, according to their LinkedIn profile.
Harsha Abegunasekara, co-founder and CEO of Donely, a rival to Ace, says he learned about the public agency buyout from an investor in startup Ozair. The deal was very bad for Donnelly. Some potential investors are happy that a well-known competitor may be off the board, while others worry that they could be pitted against Bezos if Ace becomes a key part of what Prometheus develops.
“There’s a big thing for Prometheus to acquire the whole company,” says Abegunasekara. “The thing where General Agents really failed early on is speed – Ace runs on your computer at a slow speed. We’ve been working on it for six months and we’re still not there.”
