After The New York Occasions story was printed, Guss, Ozair, and about three dozen different folks up to date their LinkedIn profiles to record their affiliation with the Bezos enterprise. A number of of these folks additionally work at Foresite Labs.
Particulars about Prometheus stay restricted. Its founding date, formal title, and headquarters haven’t been publicly recognized. However the dinner Bajaj hosted in June offered different clues.
At the very least two different featured friends that night time, together with former Nvidia senior analysis scientist Kamyar Azizzadenesheli, quietly joined Prometheus early this 12 months, their newly up to date LinkedIn profiles present.
Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit, two former Google researchers who coauthored a well-known AI paper, ended up being unable to attend the dinner. However each at the moment are founding advisers to Prometheus whereas operating their very own startups, in accordance with LinkedIn information and an individual acquainted with the matter. Not one of the researchers responded to requests for remark.
Constructed for Velocity
Ozair established Basic Brokers final 12 months, and the San Francisco startup launched its first know-how this previous April. Described as “a real-time pc pilot,” Ace takes over a pc and carries out actions based mostly on the consumer’s prompts. It’s a part of a category of instruments the AI business calls pc brokers, which might automate day by day duties on a laptop computer that span throughout totally different apps.
One demo video from the launch reveals Ace downloading a picture from Google and sending it to somebody over iMessage in underneath 15 seconds.
How Ace matches into Prometheus’ plans continues to be murky. New variations of Ace proceed to be launched as just lately as this month, in accordance with public data from Basic Brokers. The corporate’s web site and job postings stay on-line, and the chief of a workforce in India serving to practice Ace additionally joined Prometheus, in accordance with their LinkedIn profile
Harsha Abegunasekara, cofounder and CEO of Donely, which makes a competitor to Ace, says he realized of the Basic Brokers acquisition from an investor in Ozair’s startup. The deal has been a blended bag for Donely. Some potential buyers are happy {that a} well-regarded rival could also be off the board, whereas others are fearful about going up in opposition to Bezos if Ace turns into an important a part of what Prometheus develops.
“There’s something vital there for Prometheus to get the complete firm,” Abegunasekara says. “What Basic Brokers actually cracked early on is velocity—Ace runs in your pc at mild velocity. We’ve been engaged on that for six months and haven’t achieved it but.”
