00:20:42 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Healey Cypher
[00:20:42] S0: 6,000,000,000 out the gate. Let's go. Congratulations. [00:20:46] S1: This is the first time mister Bezos has taken a formal operational role in a company since he stepped down as chief executive of Amazon in July 2021. Though he is deeply involved in Blue Origin, his official title at the space company as founder, since leaving Amazon, Mr. Bezos has received as much attention for his personal life as his businesses, including an extravagant celebrity filled wedding in Venice this year. He has also become more closely involved in Blue Origin and has shown increasing interest in the race to build artificial intelligence. His new company now firmly plants him in the middle of that competition. Project Prometheus is entering an increasingly crowded AI market with smaller companies trying to carve out niches in a race with industry giants like Google, Meta, Microsoft, and pioneering companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. The new company has until now kept a low profile. And when it was started, it is not even clear. Project Prometheus is focusing on technology that dovetails with Mr. Bezos' interest in taking people to outer space. The company is focused on AI that will help in engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields, including computers, aerospace, and automobiles. [00:21:53] S0: Is this his next? Do you think this is his next? Do you think he's doing what Steve Jobs did with Next, where Steve Jobs was fired from Apple? Obviously, Bezos was not fired from Amazon, he did retire. And it'd [00:22:04] S3: be weird for him to jump straight
00:22:04 · Healey Cypher, John Coogan, Jordi Hays
[00:22:04] S3: be weird for him to jump straight [00:22:05] S0: back in to the to the CEO seat at Amazon. But Steve Jobs founded Next and then was acquired into Apple, and it kinda made for a more smooth transition back into the driver's seat. Could that be what Bezos is doing? [00:22:19] S1: I could see it. He's 61. [00:22:21] S0: He's he's young. He's got the whole third he's got the whole, like, third triple the third thirty year period that is so so such a positive omen in many people's careers. Like, Warren Buffett. Where was Warren Buffett [00:22:36] S1: at And he's gotta have more energy than ever. He's been galavanting [00:22:39] S0: around He's the in peak physical condition. [00:22:41] S1: That's right. [00:22:42] S0: He's having stacking up win win after win all over the globe. [00:22:46] S1: I think he here's a here's a a tinfoil hat. Set it up as co CEOs because Amazon will buy Project Prometheus. His co CEO becomes the, you know, the internal CEO or lead on that project at Amazon. He takes the throne again. [00:23:03] S0: I wouldn't I wouldn't [00:23:04] S1: be A boy can dream. [00:23:05] S0: So so what is he actually building? Let's get into this. [00:23:08] S1: The company is focusing on AI that will help in engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields, including computers, aerospace, and automobiles. Mhmm. Uh-huh. Unclear where the company will be based. Bezos' cofounder and co chief executive is Vik Bazaraj, a physicist.
00:23:08 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Luca Ferrari
[00:23:08] S1: The company is focusing on AI that will help in engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields, including computers, aerospace, and automobiles. Mhmm. Uh-huh. Unclear where the company will be based. Bezos' cofounder and co chief executive is Vik Bazaraj, a physicist. [00:23:25] S0: AI that helps in manufacturing of computers, aerospace, and automobiles. So computers, he manufactures racks at AWS. Aerospace, he manufactures rockets at Blue Origin. Automobiles, he's a big backer of Rivian. He manufactures cars there. And so he wants to do some sort of automated, like, supply chain. Is it ERP? [00:23:52] S1: I mean, this is clearly not PR that they wanted to do. Yeah. So I think there's a lot of guessing going on. [00:23:57] S5: Okay. Well. [00:23:59] S1: But Mr. Bezos' co founder and co chief executive is Vic Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who work closely with Google's co founder Sergey Brin. Sergey Brin at Google's X, a research effort often called the Moonshot Factory. Google X produced a wide range of ambitious projects, including Wing, a drone delivery service, and the self driving car that became Waymo.
00:23:59 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, John Tennant
[00:23:59] S1: But Mr. Bezos' co founder and co chief executive is Vic Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who work closely with Google's co founder Sergey Brin. Sergey Brin at Google's X, a research effort often called the Moonshot Factory. Google X produced a wide range of ambitious projects, including Wing, a drone delivery service, and the self driving car that became Waymo. [00:24:22] S0: It's so interesting how divergent those two paths were. Like Wing, you don't hear about very much. When you think drone delivery service, you think Keller at ZipLine. They're the ones that are really running away with that compounding. I don't know the status of Wing. Maybe I'm just out of the loop on that. Maybe it's doing great. But it feels like Wing has not certainly garnered the level of attention that Waymo did, which was this success out of the exact same sort of incubator. So interesting. Hudson [00:24:55] S1: comments in the chat says, it's just gonna be robots doing science on the material level, not Materials. Scale. Interesting. Materials. There's more details here. Project Prometheus is among a wave of companies focused on applying AI to physical tasks, including robotics, drug design, and scientific discovery. Mhmm. Last year, Bezos invested in physical intelligence, a startup that is applying AI to robots. [00:25:19] S0: Okay. So And building okay. [00:25:24] S1: Anyways, we'll have to get Jeff on Yeah. When he's ready to talk [00:25:28] S0: about where did the money come from exactly? Do we know? [00:25:31] S1: I think it was [00:25:31] S4: Just Bezos and stuff.
00:25:31 · John Tennant, Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Tyler
[00:25:31] S4: Just Bezos and stuff. [00:25:32] S1: Mostly Bezos. [00:25:35] S0: It's interesting. It's like, yeah. But like, I I I'm I'm super interested in like how you size a round if you're investing in your own project. Because you could just be like, this is my thing. I'm gonna I'm gonna fund it every payroll cycle. Yeah. Whatever the bill is, I'll pay it because it's my thing. You don't necessarily need to, like, do some sort of funding round necessarily. I don't know. [00:25:59] S1: I Why you laughing? Accidentally opened the the comment section of the New York Times article that that we were just going through [00:26:06] S0: and [00:26:06] S1: it says, first comment, these large ego models seem promising. Large ego models? Like, if you're if you're a, you know, a tech billionaire Yeah. Yeah. And you have a large ego, you you wanna you want your own large language model. [00:26:21] S0: Yeah. It sounds like he's not very much not training just another LLM. Yeah. But we'll have to see. Well, Jan Lakoun was in The Wall Street Journal's weekend paper, profiled by Megan Barrowski. An AI pioneer thinks everyone wrong everyone is wrong again. He's been right about AI for forty years now. He thinks everyone's wrong. What do you think, Tyler? Do you think Ian Lecun is wrong or do you think everyone else is wrong? [00:26:51] S2: I mean, so in this article, he doesn't there's nothing really new here. They're just kind of talking about his the points that he's been making over the past couple years, which is just that, like, LLMs will not bring us to AGI or Yeah. Or anything.
00:26:51 · Tyler, John Coogan, Luca Ferrari, Jordi Hays
[00:26:51] S2: I mean, so in this article, he doesn't there's nothing really new here. They're just kind of talking about his the points that he's been making over the past couple years, which is just that, like, LLMs will not bring us to AGI or Yeah. Or anything. [00:27:03] S0: And Yeah. [00:27:03] S2: Like, even if you keep scaling, they don't they're not, like, actually intelligent. They can't reason or whatever. [00:27:09] S0: Yep. [00:27:10] S2: Which I don't know. It's like, these models are much better than me at math. Like, they can do they can get IMO gold medals [00:27:17] S0: Yes. [00:27:17] S2: Which, like, I cannot do. And that's like it it's like, does that take reasoning? Never doubt yourself. [00:27:21] S0: But, I mean, like yeah. The the I mean, the the there is an element of, like the computer has been able to do good math fast forever, Like, since, like, the eighties. Like, if you were, like, what is 7642 Yeah. I mean, I I think there's difference [00:27:37] S2: you can you can make between just, like, raw calculation and, like, how to, like, think about solving a math question generally. And, like, you can say that he's been right about, like you could say that he predicted, like, spiky intelligence maybe of models. [00:27:50] S5: Yeah. Yeah. [00:27:51] S2: Yeah. And that's, like, sure. Yeah. [00:27:53] S0: Yeah. [00:27:54] S2: But I I I yeah. It's like I I I I think it's not true to say that he's been right about AI for the past forty years. [00:28:00] S1: Oh. That seems man's never had a bad take. Zone. Forty years. Not a single bad take.