After The New York Occasions story was revealed, Guss, Ozair, and about three dozen different individuals up to date their LinkedIn profiles to record their affiliation with the Bezos enterprise. A number of of these individuals 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.
Not less than two different featured visitors that night time, together with former Nvidia senior analysis scientist Kamyar Azizzadenesheli, quietly joined Prometheus early this yr, their newly up to date LinkedIn profiles present.
Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit, two former Google researchers who coauthored a famous 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 line with LinkedIn knowledge and an individual accustomed to the matter. Not one of the researchers responded to requests for remark.
Constructed for Velocity
Ozair established Common Brokers final yr, and the San Francisco startup launched its first expertise this previous April. Described as “a real-time laptop 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 laptop brokers, which may automate every day duties on a laptop computer that span throughout completely different apps.
One demo video from the launch reveals Ace downloading a picture from Google and sending it to somebody over iMessage in beneath 15 seconds.
How Ace matches into Prometheus’ plans remains to be murky. New variations of Ace proceed to be launched as lately as this month, in line with public data from Common Brokers. The corporate’s web site and job postings stay on-line, and the chief of a staff in India serving to practice Ace additionally joined Prometheus, in line with their LinkedIn profile
Harsha Abegunasekara, cofounder and CEO of Donely, which makes a competitor to Ace, says he discovered of the Common 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 frightened about going up in opposition to Bezos if Ace turns into a vital a part of what Prometheus develops.
“There’s something vital there for Prometheus to get the whole firm,” Abegunasekara says. “What Common Brokers actually cracked early on is velocity—Ace runs in your laptop at mild velocity. We’ve been engaged on that for six months and haven’t achieved it but.”
