After leaving his post as CEO of Amazon, the businessman did not remain idle. Behind the scenes, he orchestrated the birth of a titanic project which has just emerged from the shadows with a fundraising of 12 billion dollarsbringing its valuation to 41 billion.
His name: Prometheus. Its mission: to build a “ artificial general engineer “. The idea is not to create a consciousness or a humanoid robot like any other but a set of software tools capable of compressing development cycles that today take years into a few months, or even a few weeks.
What is Prometheus and its “artificial engineer”?
Concretely, Prometheus aims to create a new generation of computer-aided design (CAD) software, but powered by the most advanced AI.
The objective is to tackle the inherent slowness and complexity to the creation of physical objects. To illustrate his point, Bezos takes the example of an aeronautical engine manufacturer: “ If you ask them for the same engine with 10% more thrust, it may take 10 years “. Prometheus wants divide this time by tenor more.
The ambition is to create a sort of digital maestro for engineers. This AI would not just design parts, but optimize entire systems, from simulating prototypes to planning manufacturing processes.
The applications are dizzying and affect sectors as varied as aerospace (Blue Origin being a “perfect” customer according to Bezos), the drug design or even robotics. The team, already 150 people strong, draws its talents from giants like OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Nvidia.
Why such a colossal valuation of 41 billion?
A valuation of 41 billion dollars immediately places Prometheus in the league of the biggest before even having presented a concrete product. This amount is explained by the convergence of several factors.
First, the name of Jeff Bezos acts as a capital magnet, backed by giants like JPMorgan, BlackRock and Goldman Sachs. Then, the ambition of the project is disproportionate: tackling the physical economya market infinitely larger and more complex than that of pure software.
Above all, this valuation reflects the cost of ambition. A large part of funds raised will be swallowed up in the acquisition of computing power. Unlike text-based AIs that feed on data from the Internet, Prometheus must create own data of simulating the physical world, an extraordinarily resource-intensive process.
What impact will this AI have on the employment of engineers?
Will this technology make obsolete human engineers ? To this question, Jeff Bezos’ response is total opposite to the ambient discourse.
According to him, AI will not kill jobs but on the contrary create a “ labor shortage » by massively increasing productivity. His argument is that improving living standards will allow many households to move from two to one income or reduce working hours.
Bezos draws a bright future, where the machine frees man so that he can devote himself to more noble tasks. A speech that may seem dissonant coming from the founder of a company that has accelerated its own automationoften to the detriment of employment.
Vik Bajaj, its co-CEO, adds that the pace of physical creation is today restricted by our imagination. By facilitating the materialization of ideas, Prometheus would create more inventions, and therefore more work for inventors.
What are the next steps and the gray areas?
For now, Prometheus remains a black box of which not much filters through. Bezos and Bajaj remain discreet on concrete progress and characterize any announcement as “ premature “, even if the first results would be ” remarkable ».
The biggest technical challenge remains training the models. There is no ” Internet of Manufacturing Data » to aspire; everything must be generated or acquired, which raises questions about possible partnerships or acquisitions of industrial companies to feed AI.
The release schedule for the first tools remains unknown. The strategy seems to be to build a massive technology foundation before revealing anything.
