After the New York Times story was published, Guss, Ozair and about three dozen others updated their LinkedIn profiles to list their affiliation with the Bezos venture. Many of them also work at Foresight Labs.
Details about Prometheus are limited. Its founding date, formal name, and headquarters have not been publicly identified. But a dinner hosted by Bajaj in June provided other clues.
At least two other special guests that night included Kamyar Azizdanesheli, a former senior research scientist at Nvidia who quietly joined Prometheus earlier this year, as revealed by his newly updated LinkedIn profile.
Ashish Vaswani and Jacob Uszkorit, two former Google researchers who co-authored a famous AI paper, were unable to attend the dinner. But both are now becoming advisors to Prometheus while running their own startups, according to LinkedIn data and a person familiar with the matter. Neither researcher responded to requests for comment.
built for speed
Ozair founded General Agents last year, and the San Francisco startup released its first technology last April. Described as “a realtime computer pilot”, Ace takes over a computer and takes actions based on the user’s signals. It’s part of a class of tools the AI industry calls computer agents, which can automate daily tasks on a laptop spanning a variety of apps.
A demo video at the launch shows Ace downloading an image from Google and sending it to someone over iMessage in less than 15 seconds.
How Ace fits into Prometheus’s plans is still unclear. According to public data from General Agents, new versions of ACE are being released as recently as this month. The company’s website and job postings remain online, and according to his LinkedIn profile, the leader of the team that helped train Ace in India also joined Prometheus.
Harsha Abeygunasekara, co-founder and CEO of Donnelly, the company that made Ace a competitor, says he learned about the acquisition of General Agents from an investor in Ozair’s startup. The deal was a mixed bag for Donnelly. Some potential investors are pleased that a well-known rival may be off the board, while others are worried about a move against Bezos if Ace becomes a key part of Prometheus’ development.
“It’s something important for Prometheus to get the whole company,” says Abeygunasekara. “The thing that General Agents really cracked first is speed – Ace runs at lightspeed on your computer. We’ve been working on it for six months and haven’t achieved it yet.”
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