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 advisers 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 real-time 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 light speed. We’ve been working on that for six months and haven’t achieved it yet.”
