Neil Freiman

After getting married in Venice, partying on his yacht and bankrolling the Met Gala, Jeff Bezos is back in founder mode.

Yesterday, he lifted the curtain on his new company, Prometheus, the first time Bezos has occupied the CEO chair after leaving Amazon in 2021.

And you're never going to guess what business Prometheus is in.

Okay, maybe you will.

AI.

But it's not just AI the way we're accustomed to with chatbots and agents responding to our every desire on the internet.

Bezos is building so-called physical AI, applying artificial intelligence models to the real world in order to transform manufacturing and industry.

Whereas OpenAI and Anthropic are aiming to build artificial general intelligence, Bezos wants to build what he calls an artificial general engineer to supercharge production lines with superhuman-level efficiency.

To help him get there, Bezos has enlisted a co-CEO, Veek Bajaj, a former executive working on moonshots at Google X. Together, Bezos and Bajaj say they've raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation, with investors including Bezos himself, JP Morgan, BlackRock, and Goldman Sachs.

They've already hired 150 employees around the world as they move out of stealth and get ready to compete with a number of rivals hoping to usher in a robotics revolution.

Maybe that $12 billion can help.

Bezos had also some interesting things to say about work and labor in this AI future and how Prometheus and he plays into it all.

I don't think it would play well at graduation and at colleges or graduation speeches because he said that the pessimism around AI among young people is, quote,

the opposite of reality.

And he had this more optimistic take on labor in the future.

He actually said, we're going to have a labor shortage in the economy.

Instead, you know, there's been all these worries about robots taking people's jobs and chatbots taking people's jobs.

Well, he said, actually, we're not going to have enough people to do all the jobs.

And he said that there's going to be so much wealth created because of this industrial, third industrial revolution that he's helping bring about.

Because if you just reduce the costs of creating jobs,