Jeff Bezos' New AI Venture Quietly Acquired an Agentic Computing Startup Project Prometheus has raised over $6 billion in funding and hired over 100 employees, a handful of whom joined through its acquisition of General Agents, according to records and sources. 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.

With a net worth of $154.3 billion, Jeff Bezos is one of the richest men in the world. He even competes for the top title with Elon Musk in Forbes' Billionaires 2022, a wealthy list updated in real-time. And it's not surprising that Bezos has amassed massive wealth. A long list of companies is attached to his name, with Amazon leading the pack. Let's take a look at the many businesses of Jeff Bezos, from Amazon to Zappos: Bezos founded Amazon in July 1995 – predating tech giant Google.

At "New World's" character creation screen, naming yourself "Jeff Bezos," Amazon's founder, produces a brief message: "This name cannot be used." As PC gaming publication Rock Paper Shotgun discovered, numerous variations like "Jeffrey B. Zos," "Jeff Bezoos" and "Jeff Bezozs" are also not allowed (Jeff Bezos -- as opposed to Jeffrey B. Zos, Jeff Bezoos and Jeff Bezozs -- also owns The Washington Post). "Amazon" is blocked as well, as is the name of its current CEO, Andy Jassy. All the other names currently listed on Amazon's officers and directors page, as well as names of prominent current employees such as former White House press secretary Jay Carney, are not filtered.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos announced on Tuesday that he will step down as CEO later this year and become executive chairman of the company's board. He described the move in a letter to employees as an opportunity for him to focus on "new products and early initiatives" and his various pet projects like his space-flight company Blue Origin and the Washington Post. In Bezo's stead, longtime Amazon executive Andy Jassy will become the new CEO. So, who exactly is that guy? Jassy joined Amazon in 1997, three years after its founding.

Each week, I receive tons of questions from my listeners about tech concerns, new products and all things digital. Sometimes, choosing the most interesting questions to highlight is the best part of my job. This week, I received questions about old computers, fake videos, Jeff Bezos' phone and more. Do you have a question you'd like to ask me? Tap or click here to email me directly.

Amazon Inc, the world's largest online retailer, is being known these days as more of a technology company, and rightly so. Technology is at the core of whatever Amazon does -- from algorithms that forecast demand and place orders from brands, and robots that sort and pack items in warehouses to drones that will soon drop packages off at homes. At its new Go Stores, for instance, advances in computer vision have made it possible to identify the people walking in and what products they pick up, helping add them to their online shopping carts. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and the world's richest man, is always pulling new rabbits out of his hat, like next-day or same-day shipping and cashier-less stores. Besides, there is Blue Origin, the aerospace company privately owned by Bezos, which is on a mission to make spaceflight possible for everyone.

Blue Origin said it will no longer go-it-alone on the development of a lander designed to bring humans back to the lunar surface. In a press conference from the Jeff Bezos-owned aerospace company, Brent Sherwood, vice president of advanced development programs, said Blue Origin will team up with legacy defense and aerospace contractors like Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, and Draper to bring its lander, called Blue Moon, to fruition. It's partnership with those companies will help expedite the Blue Moon's production and also increase the odds that Blue Origin meets an ambitious 2024 deadline to return to the moon set by NASA. 'This is the kind of thing that is so ambitious, it needs to be done with partners,' said Bezos, who owns e-taling stalwart Amazon, at the 70th International Astronautical Congress held this week in Washington. 'This is the only way to get back to the Moon fast.'

What the Amazon founder and CEO wants for his empire and himself, and what that means for the rest of us. Where in the pantheon of American commercial titans does Jeffrey Bezos belong? Andrew Carnegie's hearths forged the steel that became the skeleton of the railroad and the city. John D. Rockefeller refined 90 percent of American oil, which supplied the pre-electric nation with light. Bill Gates created a program that was considered a prerequisite for turning on a computer. At 55, Bezos has never dominated a major market as thoroughly as any of these forebears, and while he is presently the richest man on the planet, he has less wealth than Gates did at his zenith. Yet Rockefeller largely contented himself with oil wells, pump stations, and railcars; Gates's fortune depended on an operating system. The scope of the empire the founder and CEO of Amazon has built is wider. Indeed, it is without precedent in the long history of American capitalism. More product searches are conducted ...

Since late last year, a group of workers within Amazon have been organizing to push the company to radically reduce its carbon emissions. Yesterday, they announced a major new action: on 20 September, Amazon workers around the world will walk out of their offices to join the Global Climate Strike. So far, over 1,000 workers have pledged to participate. The organizers have three demands. They want the company to commit to zero emissions by 2030, to have zero custom cloud computing contracts with fossil fuel companies, and to spend zero dollars on funding climate-denying lobbyists and politicians. I spoke to one of the walkout's organizers, a 28-year-old Amazon employee in Seattle named Rebecca Sheppard.

But innovation in chipmaking has been spurred mostly by the emergence of deep learning, a very powerful way for machines to learn to perform useful tasks. Instead of giving a computer a set of rules to follow, a machine basically programs itself. Training data is fed into a large, simulated artificial neural network, which is then tweaked so that it produces the desired result. With enough training, a deep-learning system can find subtle and abstract patterns in data. The technique is applied to an ever-growing array of practical tasks, from face recognition on smartphones to predicting disease from medical images.