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 amount of the deal wasn’t revealed.
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 Labs intends to use the data produced by those experiments to train AI models.
Image: Unsplash
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