In early June, tech entrepreneur Vik Bajaj took over Saison, a two-Michelin star restaurant in San Francisco, for an off-the-record dinner to talk about AI with journalists and a handful of scientists. In attendance was Sherjil Ozair, a late addition who had previously held senior research roles at DeepMind and Tesla. The following day, Bajaj and Ozair were on their way to making a deal, public records show.
Bajaj didn’t mention it at the dinner, but earlier this year he had begun working with Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos on a new AI venture called Project Prometheus. Backed by $6.2 billion in funding, including from Bezos, Project Prometheus is working on AI systems that can support the manufacturing of computers, cars, and even spacecraft, according to two people familiar with the startup who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.
The project has brought on over 100 employees, including Ozair and a handful of colleagues who previously worked at his agentic AI startup General Agents, which has now been acquired by Project Prometheus. Last week, the New York Times revealed the first details about Prometheus, including that Bezos and Bajaj will serve as co-CEOs. But its acquisition of General Agents hasn’t been previously reported.
Corporate filings in Delaware obtained by WIRED show that Bajaj, who previously cofounded Alphabet’s health sciences company Verily, formed an entity to acquire General Agents the morning after the San Francisco dinner. It merged with Ozair’s startup four days later. Terms of the deal could not be learned.
The records list General Agents’ new address as the San Francisco headquarters of Foresite Labs, a Bajaj-led biotech incubator. He and Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, have previously been connected through the billionaire’s investments in biotech companies Bajaj helped start or run, such as Grail and Xaira Therapeutics, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Bajaj and Ozair did not respond to requests for comment. Mythos Ventures, which had invested in General Agents prior to the acquisition, declined to comment. Foresite Labs, which hosted the June dinner, also declined to comment.
Two days after the acquisition, General Agents cofounder and former OpenAI research scientist William Guss posted a request on social media for introductions to people working in US manufacturing. “I’d love to talk really trying to understand the space and see some factories :)” Guss wrote.
After The New York Times story was published, Guss, Ozair, and about three dozen other people updated their LinkedIn profiles to list their affiliation with the Bezos venture. Several of those people also work at Foresite Labs.
Details about Prometheus remain limited. Its founding date, formal name, and headquarters haven’t been publicly identified. But the dinner Bajaj hosted in June provided other clues.
At least two other featured guests that night, including former Nvidia senior research scientist Kamyar Azizzadenesheli, quietly joined Prometheus early this year, their newly updated LinkedIn profiles show.
Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit, two former Google researchers who coauthored a famous AI paper ended up being unable to attend the dinner. But both are now founding advisors to Prometheus while running their own startups, according to LinkedIn data and a person familiar with the matter. None of the researchers responded to requests for comment.
Built for Speed
Ozair established General Agents last year, and the San Francisco startup released its first technology this past April. Described as “a realtime computer pilot,” Ace takes over a computer and carries out actions based on the user’s prompts. It’s part of a class of tools the AI industry calls computer agents, which can automate daily tasks on a laptop that span across different apps.
One demo video from the launch shows Ace downloading an image from Google and sending it to someone over iMessage in under 15 seconds.
How Ace fits into Prometheus’ plans is still murky. New versions of Ace continue to be released as recently as this month, according to public data from General Agents. The company’s website and job postings remain online, and the leader of a team in India helping train Ace also joined Prometheus, according to their LinkedIn profile
Harsha Abegunasekara, cofounder and CEO of Donely, which makes a competitor to Ace, says he learned of the General Agents acquisition from an investor in Ozair’s startup. The deal has been a mixed bag for Donely. Some potential investors are pleased that a well-regarded rival may be off the board, while others are worried about going up against Bezos if Ace becomes a crucial part of what Prometheus develops.
“There is something important there for Prometheus to get the entire company,” Abegunasekara says. “What General Agents really cracked early on is speed—Ace runs on your computer at lightspeed. We’ve been working on that for six months and haven’t achieved it yet.”
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