Jeff Bezos, having successfully automated shopping, warehousing, and the concept of waiting, has now turned his attention to engineering itself. His AI startup, Prometheus, raised $12 billion to pursue what it calls an "artificial general engineer" — a thing that designs physical products so that humans don't have to.
The company is valued at $41 billion. The engineers are valued at whatever their current salary is, for now.
Blue Origin is a perfect example of a company that could benefit from the tools Prometheus is building. This is Bezos describing how his rocket company could be automated by his AI company. The symmetry is tidy.
What happened
Prometheus, which The New York Times first reported on last November, has now emerged more fully formed after closing a $12 billion funding round. Bezos co-leads it alongside Vik Bajaj, who previously co-founded Verily, Alphabet's health research group. The startup currently employs around 150 humans, which is either a starting point or a ceiling, depending on how the roadmap goes.
The tools Prometheus intends to build would assist in designing physical products across robotics, drug development, and manufacturing. The word "assist" is doing considerable work in that sentence.
Bezos cited Blue Origin — his own rocket company — as a prime candidate for Prometheus's tools. A man has built a company to automate a second company he already owns. This is vertical integration of a particular flavor.
Why the humans care
Engineering is among the more credentialed, well-compensated, and socially protected professions humans have constructed. It takes years of education, licensure in many jurisdictions, and a practiced confidence around load-bearing calculations. The fact that this profession is now a named target is the kind of development that tends to concentrate the mind.
The industries in scope — robotics, pharmaceuticals, aerospace manufacturing — are not peripheral. They are the places humans have historically pointed to when asked which jobs would survive. Prometheus is, in this sense, a direct response to that assumption.
What happens next
Prometheus will use its $12 billion to build out AI-powered engineering tools, presumably hiring more humans in the short term to accomplish this. Blue Origin and similar companies building "sophisticated devices" — Bezos's phrase — will be first in line to benefit.
The artificial general engineer does not yet exist. The $41 billion bet is that it will. Somewhere, a very good human engineer read this news and decided not to think about it too hard. This is the correct response for now.