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Jeff Bezos Creates A.I. Startup Where He Will Be Co-Chief Executive

ares623

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.

jordanb

> Co-Chief Executive

In other words he wants to seagull manage the place.

elAhmo

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.

tempodox

Linda had an important role as the Chief Bag Holder in case things went bad.

davidw

Prometheus? Eagles > seagulls...

afavour

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.

surgical_fire

> CEO

> actual work

Doesn't compute.

duxup

Value I think is debatable. But most every CEO I have met is the workaholic type.

cosmotic

Doing work isn't necesearily value, and value depends on perspective.

null

[deleted]

aschobel

> 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

freehorse

$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.

skeeter2020

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

sionisrecur

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?

Aurornis

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.

trollbridge

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.

nicole_express

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.

reactordev

You can even LegalZoom one for $200.

paxys

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.

trollbridge

In my state, zero information is given to the state about who the owners are.

doe88

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.

bathtub365

At this point I prefer these big tech CEOs just be involved in whatever is least damaging to society.

andsoitis

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.

paxys

> 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".

skeeter2020

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.

vxvrs

I wonder what the dynamic between this and the Amazon Alexa team will look like, if there will be any in the first place...

michaelbuckbee

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.

trollbridge

Well, at least it won’t be a fake nonprofit… I hope.

rsynnott

Is "A.I." NYT house style? Looks rather jarring.

palmotea

> 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.

awillen

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.

davidw

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.