Wouldn't be surprised if the funding is based on a circular investment of some AI chipset vendor to consume the compute power of the chipsets AWS is buying.
"We buy this amount of chips at price xx, you guarantee us utilization in part by investing in an AI company we will create"
The UN doesn’t say that a human life is actually worth $10 million but that’s the number we’re going to use, so the question is as QALY thing how much is a liver transplant worth and it turns out the liver transplant gets you about 25 QALYs, and so running the numbers a liver is only about $3.75 million.
$6.2 billion which are prob to be invested in amazon to be invested in the startup to be invested in amazon, so I would not assume such an amount actually implies the size where this would be surprising.
Is that a thing in the US? You start a company and there's no need to register it with the government? Or it gets registered but there's no public records of it?
All companies are registered. They have to be registered to be legal entities, have bank accounts, and comply with tax laws.
Private companies don’t need to publicly divulge a lot, though. It’s between the company and their investors. It’s only once a company wants to trade publicly that they have to provide a lot of public details and financials.
You don’t have to register a general partnership as long as it has one of the partners’ last name in the partnership name, although I guess you have to get an EIN to file partnership taxes.
A sole proprietorship doesn’t have to register anything ever at all.
A company can be a sole proprietership or partnership without registering with anyone, but in this case in most states they must either conduct business in the owners/partners names or register a DBA with the state(s) they are doing business in. (the rules are state specific, and I think there are some states that don't do kr require DBA registration). In most cases, a company with billions invested in it will be formed as a formal entity such as an LLC or Corporation in a state. Again, the specifics vary from state to state. If you knew the legal name of this entity, and what syate it was registered in, you could probably look up when it was registered in that state.
However, details like owners and organizers aren't always Available.
It gets further complicated with Series LLCs.
Congress passed a law that would have required "beneficial ownership" registration with law enforcement (FinCen), however, this registration would not have been public.
Further, it was found unconstitutional and enforcement of the registration requirement indefinitely suspended.
In general, if you are doing business in a state under a name or entiry other than your own legal name, you will be required to file something with the state, and that filing will include a registered agent where legal process can be served on the business, and this information will be public.
But if they aren't doing business publicly yet, no one will know the name of the business, so they can't look it up! It sounds like the name mentioned in the article may just be a code name.
You can basically form a corporate entity with a nominal Delaware office, but it doesn't need to give any details about where the actual work takes place, yeah.
There are thousands of companies registered every day across the US. This one is probably a subdivision of a subdivision of some holding company owned by Bezos. Pretty much impossible to track using just public data.
Q: could this be an "experiment" in AI financing? i.e. he's bankrolled 6.2B, then strategic quasi-purchases and cross investments will multiply that money without ever needing to spend it on anything - except AWS hosting of course
based on linkedin it looks like they took a failed company thats existed for a year "General agents" which had what just looked like a single browser agent and now have rebranded that.
> its work will resemble that of Periodic Labs, which is building technology to speed up scientific research by simulating the physical world to train AI models.
Will be interesting to see how far simulation gets you vs actual embodiment via robots, etc.
Despite the critiques that is something worthwhile I can understand, maybe there is a time in your life you want to be involved in something big, but not 100% like you were at your prime you have the opportunity to do it, so why not. You remain engaged. I prefer seeing that than doing nothing of something useless.
I think that’s a very mature, realistic take. Personally, if I was a 60 year old billionaire, I’d probably be having a series of long vacations or chilling in my yacht. It’s cool that bezos is still trying.
Maybe! I certainly hope so. But if my life thus far is any indication, I do enjoy working hard but also have to fight _really_ hard to not slip into laziness, even though it makes me less happy. Something about the delayed gratification of doing hard things -- there is a ton of gratification, but my monkey brain hates the delay.
A lot of negative posts here, but AI to advance science seems like basically the best possible use case. The more ultrawealthy people who want to throw billions at it, the better.
Wasn't OpenAI also for the embetterment of society? Looking at how things went for all high profile AI companies, why should we trust this one? Even if they got a saint to run as CEO they would find a way to screw humanity over.
Notably, Amazon has already invested $8 billion in Anthropic/Claude, so I'm hoping this is actually something wildly different and with a different approach.
Haha.. busted. I do enjoy fashion blogs (specifically Tom and Lorenzo https://tomandlorenzo.com/) and always notice Bezos out galavanting around at the events they post!
Being a celebrity doesn't sound like it would take that much time, especially for someone like him who probably just is physically present for things and leaves all planning to others. In fact, being coCEO is probably literally just more of the same to him.
I have a weird sense that this is a way to get his kids that are technical into a family business without having them work at a company that isn't considered prestigious
> Is "A.I." NYT house style? Looks rather jarring.
I think their style is to use periods for acronyms, which I believe is traditional. A quick scan of their recent headlines turns up "U.S", "A.I.", "A.T.M.", "ICE", "L.P.G.A.", "REI", "U.K." I don't know what the reasoning behind the use of "ICE" and "REI" is, could be a mistake or a judgement that those words are tend to not be understood as acronyms, or something else.
IIRC they used to always style "NASA" as "N.A.S.A." even though the agency itself never uses periods and is of course always pronounced as a word rather than initials. (This particular example stuck in my mind just because I work there). Hopefully "ICE" and "REI" reflect a change in that style to omit periods when referring to organizations that omit the periods in their own style guides.
Looks to me like initialisms get periods unless they are acronyms or trademarks. So "ICE" is fine because it is read as "ice" and not I.C.E. (eye-see-ee). REI is not an initialism though, but presumably they have kept it as-is because it's their trademark/"doing business as" style.
I thought startup was supposed to mean "we're still starting up our business", but it sounds like the meaning these days is closer to "we are setting piles of cash on fire".
Wants all the power without actually doing the CEO's job. Quite ridiculous, similarly how there were two heads of "DOGE" or Twitter having Linda Yaccarino as the CEO.
setting aside the AWS DB offerring I've done 2 "Project: Aurora" in the past 3 years, and a bonus project "Audite" (make sure you say it correctly when execs are around!)
Look, I'm all for "big bets" but when the majority of time and effort goes into the naming, kick-off and t-shirt design, this ain't it.
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Amazon itself has become so corrupted and disfunctional that all of their internal AI efforts amount to just burning billions for bottom-of-the-barrel results[0]. I'm not surprised that 5 person startups are building better AI products than all of Amazon, or that Bezos decided to start an AI company outside of Amazon.
It's really not surprising. AWS is definitely absolutely now in the category of "too big to fail". And the fact that there's an entire AWS region for US government classified stuff just underscores that.
Becoming TBTF has a very corrosive effect on organizations.
It’s free money. You spend 3billion and have more billions drop in from investors. You get to create great tech and then make 100s more billions drop from IPO. When the initial investment is a rounding error in your portfolio, it’s a crime to not do this
It takes extraordinary skill to successfully juggle multiple ventures. So it is natural for some to want to take on the challenge. I think it is pretty impressive.
> It takes extraordinary skill to successfully juggle multiple ventures.
That's a myth. I've done that, and I know a lot of people who do that. Do you think Musk is writing sparse attention code for Grok? Does he even know how Grok's architecture works under the hood? Or that he designed the data centers? I mean, you delegate stuff. The only hard thing is getting the right people, but if you're a hyped up billionaire, it's easy mode because you can pay a lot, and people want to work for you. You just create an environment where they can achieve things.
There are times when the majority of your work is simply attending public meetings, podcasts, and doing interviews. People really overestimate what's involved in the work of a billionaire CEO. The people actually making things happen in space industry or AI work harder, longer, and solve more complex problems than any CEO and in some cases they need to work hard against the CEOs to actually make things happen.
And he's not juggling Blue Origin that well given the delays. Still impressive to go to space, so the man deserves credit, but it likely would have been several years faster and billions less if he had been more involved.
In the old days there was a saying "The only way Bill Gates could spend all his fortune is a manned mission to Mars."
Well, Bezos and Musk are trying that, and it turns out there is still a lot left to spend, so instead of helping the needy they do what is trendy for billionaires, which is build another AI company.
Amazon itself has become so corrupted and disfunctional that all of their internal AI efforts amount to just burning billions for bottom-of-the-barrel results[0]. I'm not surprised that 5 person startups are building better AI products than all of Amazon, or that Bezos decided to start an AI company outside of Amazon.
Wouldn't be surprised if the funding is based on a circular investment of some AI chipset vendor to consume the compute power of the chipsets AWS is buying.
"We buy this amount of chips at price xx, you guarantee us utilization in part by investing in an AI company we will create"
Why does it feel like the entire US economy at the moment is supported by 5-6 companies constantly moving around a couple of trillion dollars?
Because it is
Because we’re in a bubble.
People have been saying we are in a bubble since before covid...
And for his sin of stealing fire from the gods he’ll be chained to a rock and an eagle will eat his liver every day for the rest of eternity.
For the humor, mocked up an Amazon page reflecting this scenario:
- - -
Human Liver, 14.4 cm
Visit Jeff Bezos' Store
3 Stars (1)
$14,000,000
Coupon: [ ] Save an extra 5% on your first Subscribe and Save order.
In Stock
Quantity: 1
( Subscribe )
Save 5% now and up to 15% on future deliveries
SNAP EBT available
Delivery every: 1 day (Most common)
The UN doesn’t say that a human life is actually worth $10 million but that’s the number we’re going to use, so the question is as QALY thing how much is a liver transplant worth and it turns out the liver transplant gets you about 25 QALYs, and so running the numbers a liver is only about $3.75 million.
> The new company has until now kept a low profile, and when it was started is not even clear.
Any more details? Where is it located? Who is working there,
For $6.2 billion raised I’m surprised their aren’t more details
$6.2 billion which are prob to be invested in amazon to be invested in the startup to be invested in amazon, so I would not assume such an amount actually implies the size where this would be surprising.
More circular financing to keep the AI house of cards from falling?
Yeah since there isn't any actual real spend going into AI...
Is that a thing in the US? You start a company and there's no need to register it with the government? Or it gets registered but there's no public records of it?
All companies are registered. They have to be registered to be legal entities, have bank accounts, and comply with tax laws.
Private companies don’t need to publicly divulge a lot, though. It’s between the company and their investors. It’s only once a company wants to trade publicly that they have to provide a lot of public details and financials.
You don’t have to register a general partnership as long as it has one of the partners’ last name in the partnership name, although I guess you have to get an EIN to file partnership taxes.
A sole proprietorship doesn’t have to register anything ever at all.
A company can be a sole proprietership or partnership without registering with anyone, but in this case in most states they must either conduct business in the owners/partners names or register a DBA with the state(s) they are doing business in. (the rules are state specific, and I think there are some states that don't do kr require DBA registration). In most cases, a company with billions invested in it will be formed as a formal entity such as an LLC or Corporation in a state. Again, the specifics vary from state to state. If you knew the legal name of this entity, and what syate it was registered in, you could probably look up when it was registered in that state.
However, details like owners and organizers aren't always Available.
It gets further complicated with Series LLCs.
Congress passed a law that would have required "beneficial ownership" registration with law enforcement (FinCen), however, this registration would not have been public.
Further, it was found unconstitutional and enforcement of the registration requirement indefinitely suspended.
In general, if you are doing business in a state under a name or entiry other than your own legal name, you will be required to file something with the state, and that filing will include a registered agent where legal process can be served on the business, and this information will be public.
But if they aren't doing business publicly yet, no one will know the name of the business, so they can't look it up! It sounds like the name mentioned in the article may just be a code name.
Interesting. If one were to legally change their name to their desired DBA name, I wonder how that would go over.
You can basically form a corporate entity with a nominal Delaware office, but it doesn't need to give any details about where the actual work takes place, yeah.
You can even LegalZoom one for $200.
There are thousands of companies registered every day across the US. This one is probably a subdivision of a subdivision of some holding company owned by Bezos. Pretty much impossible to track using just public data.
In my state, zero information is given to the state about who the owners are.
Q: could this be an "experiment" in AI financing? i.e. he's bankrolled 6.2B, then strategic quasi-purchases and cross investments will multiply that money without ever needing to spend it on anything - except AWS hosting of course
based on linkedin it looks like they took a failed company thats existed for a year "General agents" which had what just looked like a single browser agent and now have rebranded that.
From the TechCrunch article;
> its work will resemble that of Periodic Labs, which is building technology to speed up scientific research by simulating the physical world to train AI models.
Will be interesting to see how far simulation gets you vs actual embodiment via robots, etc.
Everyone knows that the best companies have two CEOs.
Seems to be working for Waymo so far, though of course Waymo isn't an independent company.
Despite the critiques that is something worthwhile I can understand, maybe there is a time in your life you want to be involved in something big, but not 100% like you were at your prime you have the opportunity to do it, so why not. You remain engaged. I prefer seeing that than doing nothing of something useless.
At this point I prefer these big tech CEOs just be involved in whatever is least damaging to society.
I think that’s a very mature, realistic take. Personally, if I was a 60 year old billionaire, I’d probably be having a series of long vacations or chilling in my yacht. It’s cool that bezos is still trying.
Maybe you wouldn't. Maybe you'd find it difficult to walk away from the lifestyle that made you a billionaire in the first place.
Maybe! I certainly hope so. But if my life thus far is any indication, I do enjoy working hard but also have to fight _really_ hard to not slip into laziness, even though it makes me less happy. Something about the delayed gratification of doing hard things -- there is a ton of gratification, but my monkey brain hates the delay.
A lot of negative posts here, but AI to advance science seems like basically the best possible use case. The more ultrawealthy people who want to throw billions at it, the better.
It depends on how much they're actually doing in the service of science, and how much is "flashy AI stuff".
I don't have a lot of hope that it's the former, to be honest. These people have burned up all their goodwill.
Wasn't OpenAI also for the embetterment of society? Looking at how things went for all high profile AI companies, why should we trust this one? Even if they got a saint to run as CEO they would find a way to screw humanity over.
Notably, Amazon has already invested $8 billion in Anthropic/Claude, so I'm hoping this is actually something wildly different and with a different approach.
Well, at least it won’t be a fake nonprofit… I hope.
Well, Elon gets enormous amounts of tax dollars enabling him to move resources around between his investments. The billionaires aren't differentiable.
> The billionaires aren't differentiable
Probably because they're not continuous?
I feel like he's too distracted by his celebrity lifestyle these days to really focus on running a company.
He just paid for Kris Jenner's 70th birthday party at his house where they had the cops called on them: https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/kris-jenn...
and he disinvited Elon Musk (lol): https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/elon-...
Here he is out showboating at the Oscars, Vanity Fair parties, the white house, in Hollywood, in Monaco, Paris Fashion Week, Sun Valley, Milan, NYC, various galas all in the last year: https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-fa...
I don't want to be mean, but to be honest, your post makes me wonder if you are too distracted by the celebrity lifestyle (of others).
I don't have this treasure trove of information about Bezos' life and I don't think it makes me any less informed about the world?
Haha.. busted. I do enjoy fashion blogs (specifically Tom and Lorenzo https://tomandlorenzo.com/) and always notice Bezos out galavanting around at the events they post!
You seem very up to date with all of the celebrity gossip.
[dead]
Being a celebrity doesn't sound like it would take that much time, especially for someone like him who probably just is physically present for things and leaves all planning to others. In fact, being coCEO is probably literally just more of the same to him.
Pretty gossipy
I have a weird sense that this is a way to get his kids that are technical into a family business without having them work at a company that isn't considered prestigious
Is "A.I." NYT house style? Looks rather jarring.
> Is "A.I." NYT house style? Looks rather jarring.
I think their style is to use periods for acronyms, which I believe is traditional. A quick scan of their recent headlines turns up "U.S", "A.I.", "A.T.M.", "ICE", "L.P.G.A.", "REI", "U.K." I don't know what the reasoning behind the use of "ICE" and "REI" is, could be a mistake or a judgement that those words are tend to not be understood as acronyms, or something else.
IIRC they used to always style "NASA" as "N.A.S.A." even though the agency itself never uses periods and is of course always pronounced as a word rather than initials. (This particular example stuck in my mind just because I work there). Hopefully "ICE" and "REI" reflect a change in that style to omit periods when referring to organizations that omit the periods in their own style guides.
I don’t think this has been true for the vast majority of NASA’s existence. [This 1966 NYT article about Gemini](https://www.nytimes.com/1966/03/20/archives/gemini-8-mishap-...), [this 1986 article about Challenger](https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/22/us/nasa-had-solution-to-k...), and [this 2010 article about Constellation](https://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/27/science/space/27nasa.html) all omit periods. Even if NYT did stylize it as “N.A.S.A.” in its earliest articles, this would not diverge from common agency practice early on. For instance, in [this official reel about the dedication of Marshall Space Flight Center](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fasslw4MvE), it is pronounced spelled-out as four letters.
Looks to me like initialisms get periods unless they are acronyms or trademarks. So "ICE" is fine because it is read as "ice" and not I.C.E. (eye-see-ee). REI is not an initialism though, but presumably they have kept it as-is because it's their trademark/"doing business as" style.
That is correct and also how everyone else should be using the English language.
The “REI” initialism, is the official d.b.a. for the Recreational Equipment, Inc. company.
Erratum: I meant to say that REI is an initialism but not an acronym
Artificialïntelligence
This is the NYT, not the New Yorker
Recap for those before the paywall:
New AI co, Bezos as co-CEO (alongside Vik Bajaj, ex-Google X)
$6.2b in funding
Nearly 100 employees
AI + real world scientific experiments, for the engineering and manufacturing of computers, automobiles and spacecraft
In what world is that still a startup!?
I thought startup was supposed to mean "we're still starting up our business", but it sounds like the meaning these days is closer to "we are setting piles of cash on fire".
Engineers were modeled after him?
https://archive.is/ZhmTd
I read "co-defendant" for a second there. Oh well.
Everything from A to I
Jeff Bezos as a CO-CEO sounds like a corporate structure recipe for disaster.
It’s pretty common sentiment with senior level Amazonians that Uncle Jeff was a great leader. Many lament his departure and loathe his replacement.
Lifestyle distractions aside, Bezos playing any kind of CEO role is probably a good thing.
How do they break ties?
Dip said ties in liquid nitrogen and hit them with a hammer
Why?
I wonder what the dynamic between this and the Amazon Alexa team will look like, if there will be any in the first place...
I think it's actually going to be healthy for the ecosystem on the whole. The more competition, the better.
If you believe that rushing capabilities ASAP is the right call, that is.
He saw all of the grifting at OpenAI and said to himself: "I can do that!"
I don't get the downvotes. This is a case of the simplest explanation being the most likely one.
Just before the AI bubble goes pop too. I think by my estimates there's three more months left...
Not many people can do the "Just-do-what-Musk-does" playbook, but this will no doubt be a good little bunse for him.
If there were a founder I believed who could, it would be Jeff B
The fact that Amazon hit it big twice under him (retail and then web services) speaks volumes. Hard to pretend he just got lucky.
YAAS (Yet Another AI Startup). Yawn.
In the fires of Mount Doom, a 6th frontier lab was secretly forged. For none could resist being a CEO of an AI startup before the music stops.
When you’re rich, you can even buy vanity CEO roles.
Openai, deepmind, anthropic, xai. who is the fifth frontier lab?
FAIR (I mean MSI) or grab bag of other runner ups
Microsoft Advanced AI Research
> Co-Chief Executive
In other words he wants to seagull manage the place.
Wants all the power without actually doing the CEO's job. Quite ridiculous, similarly how there were two heads of "DOGE" or Twitter having Linda Yaccarino as the CEO.
Linda had an important role as the Chief Bag Holder in case things went bad.
Prometheus? Eagles > seagulls...
"I bring the money, so I have the last word on everything. Now talk."
Co-CEO. So he gets to boast about being CEO of an AI company at dinner parties while leaving someone else to do the actual work.
The Amazon Prime Video approach
> CEO
> actual work
Doesn't compute.
Value I think is debatable. But most every CEO I have met is the workaholic type.
> Called Project Prometheus
What is it about tech people and being unable to come up with original names?
Every company I have worked for has had two dozen internal tools and projects called "Prometheus".
setting aside the AWS DB offerring I've done 2 "Project: Aurora" in the past 3 years, and a bonus project "Audite" (make sure you say it correctly when execs are around!)
Look, I'm all for "big bets" but when the majority of time and effort goes into the naming, kick-off and t-shirt design, this ain't it.
> Project “Audite”
Reminds me of Matt Levine joking about walking into a hedge fund with a SEC jacket memorabilia.
https://archive.ph/K1sNB
[flagged]
There’s already Amazon store credit for that
bezobux
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So we now have one AI startup run by Jeff Bezos and another AI startup run by Beff Jezos. What a weird timeline.
Amazon itself has become so corrupted and disfunctional that all of their internal AI efforts amount to just burning billions for bottom-of-the-barrel results[0]. I'm not surprised that 5 person startups are building better AI products than all of Amazon, or that Bezos decided to start an AI company outside of Amazon.
[0]https://labs.amazon.science/
It's really not surprising. AWS is definitely absolutely now in the category of "too big to fail". And the fact that there's an entire AWS region for US government classified stuff just underscores that.
Becoming TBTF has a very corrosive effect on organizations.
I wasn't referring to Amazon as the other AI startup. I was referring to another guy who is known by the name "Beff Jezos", who runs Extropic.
Expect a third soon. Bezos really wants to have another hit.
I wasn't referring to Amazon. There's actually another person called "Beff Jezos" who runs an AI startup called Extropic.
I think it’s great that there will be more competition in the space, not to mention more hiring, etc.
Honestly, why? Why not just focus on Blue Origin?
I don't get this new Musk-like tendency to run multiple ventures instead of focusing on one very tough mission.
It’s free money. You spend 3billion and have more billions drop in from investors. You get to create great tech and then make 100s more billions drop from IPO. When the initial investment is a rounding error in your portfolio, it’s a crime to not do this
Or they could just be happy with the many billions they have.
A lot of people unfortunately believe in the musical chairs theory of markets.
It’s a simple way to sound cynical and savvy. Good thing it’s also extremely incorrect.
It takes extraordinary skill to successfully juggle multiple ventures. So it is natural for some to want to take on the challenge. I think it is pretty impressive.
> It takes extraordinary skill to successfully juggle multiple ventures.
That's a myth. I've done that, and I know a lot of people who do that. Do you think Musk is writing sparse attention code for Grok? Does he even know how Grok's architecture works under the hood? Or that he designed the data centers? I mean, you delegate stuff. The only hard thing is getting the right people, but if you're a hyped up billionaire, it's easy mode because you can pay a lot, and people want to work for you. You just create an environment where they can achieve things.
There are times when the majority of your work is simply attending public meetings, podcasts, and doing interviews. People really overestimate what's involved in the work of a billionaire CEO. The people actually making things happen in space industry or AI work harder, longer, and solve more complex problems than any CEO and in some cases they need to work hard against the CEOs to actually make things happen.
Maybe he has this skill, but I also know a lot of folks who like to have the control and glory, but don't want to put in the time basically.
And he's not juggling Blue Origin that well given the delays. Still impressive to go to space, so the man deserves credit, but it likely would have been several years faster and billions less if he had been more involved.
In the old days there was a saying "The only way Bill Gates could spend all his fortune is a manned mission to Mars."
Well, Bezos and Musk are trying that, and it turns out there is still a lot left to spend, so instead of helping the needy they do what is trendy for billionaires, which is build another AI company.
Once they have the AI company, thennnn they will help the poor right? They will use AI to help the poor!!!
Elon's comment: https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1990479697793491195
Amazon itself has become so corrupted and disfunctional that all of their internal AI efforts amount to just burning billions for bottom-of-the-barrel results[0]. I'm not surprised that 5 person startups are building better AI products than all of Amazon, or that Bezos decided to start an AI company outside of Amazon.
[0]https://labs.amazon.science/