Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus Quietly Acquires AI Agent Startup General Agents

Jeff Bezos' New AI Venture Quietly Acquired an Agentic Computing Startup

Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, at an event in New York.Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images In early June, tech entrepreneur Vik Bajaj took over Saison, a two-Michelin star restaurant in San Francisco, for an off-the-record dinner to talk about AI with journalists and a handful of scientists. In attendance was Sherjil Ozair, a late addition who had previously held senior research roles at DeepMind and Tesla. The following day, Bajaj and Ozair were on their way to making a deal, public records show. Bajaj didn't mention it at the dinner, but earlier this year he had begun working with Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos on a new AI venture called Project Prometheus. Backed by $6.2 billion in funding, including from Bezos, Project Prometheus is working on AI systems that can support the manufacturing of computers, cars, and even spacecraft, according to two people familiar with the startup who were not authorized to discuss it publicly. The project has brought on over 100 employees, including Ozair and a handful of colleagues who previously worked at his agentic AI startup General Agents, which has now been acquired by Project Prometheus. Last week, the New York Times revealed the first details about Prometheus, including that Bezos and Bajaj will serve as co-CEOs. But its acquisition of General Agents hasn't been previously reported. Corporate filings in Delaware obtained by WIRED show that Bajaj, who previously cofounded Alphabet's health sciences company Verily, formed an entity to acquire General Agents the morning after the San Francisco dinner. It merged with Ozair's startup four days later. Terms of the deal could not be learned. The records list General Agents' new address as the San Francisco headquarters of Foresite Labs, a Bajaj-led biotech incubator. He and Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, have previously been connected through the billionaire's investments in biotech companies Bajaj helped start or run, such as Grail and Xaira Therapeutics, according to a person familiar with the matter. Bajaj and Ozair did not respond to requests for comment. Mythos Ventures, which had invested in General Agents prior to the acquisition, declined to comment. Foresite Labs, which hosted the June dinner, also declined to comment. Two days after the acquisition, General Agents cofounder and former OpenAI research scientist William Guss posted a request on social media for introductions to people working in US manufacturing. "I'd love to talk really trying to understand the space and see some factories :)" Guss wrote.

Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus reportedly acquires AI startup General Agents - SiliconANGLE

Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus reportedly acquires AI startup General Agents Project Prometheus, a new company co-led by Jeff Bezos, has reportedly acquired a low-profile artificial intelligence startup called General Agents. Wired reported the deal today. The existence of Project Prometheus was revealed by the New York Times last week. The company is co-led by Bezos and Vik Bajaj, a serial technology entrepreneur who earlier co-founded Alphabet Inc.'s Verily life sciences unit. Project Prometheus has reportedly raised $6.2 billion in funding from an investor consortium that included Bezos. According to Wired, the company is developing AI systems that can "support the manufacturing of computers, cars and even spacecraft." The publication's sources didn't specify what production processes Project Prometheus intends to automate or how. Project Prometheus is believed to have acquired General Agents in June. The deal reportedly closed shortly after one of the latter company's founders, former Google DeepMind researcher Sherjil Ozair, attended an AI event hosted by Bajaj. General Machines' other founder, William Guss, previously held a research role at OpenAI Group PBC. The startup has developed an AI agent called Ace that can autonomously perform tasks on the user's computer. Demos on General Agents' website indicate that Ace is capable of editing videos, copying data between applications and booking accommodations. The company claims that the tool performs some tasks better than OpenAI's Operator agent. According to General Agents' website, Ace is powered by at least two custom foundation models called ace-control-small and ace-control-medium. A job posting indicates that the company's models are based on a so-called VLA, or video-language-action, architecture. That may provide a clue as to why General Agents caught Project Prometheus' attention. Researchers mainly use the VLA architecture to develop AI models for robots. Given that Project Prometheus reportedly plans to build AI systems for manufacturing use cases, industrial robots are likely a focus of its engineering roadmap. The technology and know-how that the company gained through the General Agents acquisition could advance its efforts in that area. Project Prometheus reportedly hired a "handful" of General Agents staffers including its two co-founders. The company is now believed to have more than 100 employees. Last week's Times report indicated that Project Prometheus plans to train AI models using a similar method as a startup called Periodic Labs Inc. The latter company, which raised $300 million last month, is building an autonomous lab that will use robots to carry out scientific experiments. Periodic Lab intends to use the data produced by those experiments to train AI models.

Jeff Bezos' AI Startup Acquires Computer Agent Maker General Agents | PYMNTS.com

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 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.