Bezos-backed Project Prometheus raised billions, quietly recruited scores after a Michelin dinner, and a late arrival changed everything last night…

Project Prometheus has raised over $6 billion in funding and hired more than 100 employees, a number of whom arrived through its purchase of General Agents, according to records and people familiar with the matter.

In early June, entrepreneur Vik Bajaj hosted an off-the-record dinner at Saison, a two-Michelin-star restaurant in San Francisco, where he spoke about artificial intelligence with journalists and a small group of scientists. Sherjil Ozair, who previously held senior research roles at DeepMind and Tesla, joined at the last minute. Public records show Bajaj and Ozair were moving toward a transaction the next day.

Bajaj did not bring up the arrangement at the dinner, though he had earlier in the year begun working with Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos on an AI initiative called Project Prometheus. Backed by $6.2 billion in funding, including from Bezos, Project Prometheus is focused on building AI systems that can support the manufacturing of computers, cars, and even spacecraft, two people familiar with the startup said on the condition of anonymity.

The venture has taken on more than 100 staffers, among them Ozair and several colleagues from his agentic AI startup General Agents, which has been folded into Prometheus. Last week, the New York Times published an initial report revealing that Bezos and Bajaj will serve as co-CEOs; the acquisition of General Agents had not been publicly disclosed until now.

Corporate filings in Delaware show that Bajaj, who cofounded Alphabet’s health sciences company Verily, formed an entity to acquire General Agents the morning after the San Francisco dinner. That entity merged with Ozair’s company four days later. The terms of the deal were not available in the filings.

Those records list General Agents’ new address as the San Francisco headquarters of Foresite Labs, a biotech incubator led by Bajaj. Bajaj and Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, have been linked through the billionaire’s investments in biotech companies Bajaj helped start or run, including 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 before the acquisition, declined to comment. Foresite Labs, the host of the June dinner, also declined to comment.

Two days after the acquisition, General Agents cofounder and former OpenAI research scientist William Guss posted on social media asking for introductions to people working in U.S. manufacturing. “I’d love to talk really trying to understand the space and see some factories :)” Guss wrote.

Following the New York Times report, Guss, Ozair and roughly three dozen others updated their LinkedIn profiles to list their affiliation with the Bezos-backed venture. Several of the people who changed their profiles are also connected to Foresite Labs.

Public details about Prometheus remain sparse. The company’s founding date, formal name and headquarters have not been publicly identified. The June dinner provided other clues about the early team.

At least two other guests that night, including former Nvidia senior research scientist Kamyar Azizzadenesheli, appear to have joined Prometheus earlier this year, according to their LinkedIn updates. Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit, two former Google researchers who coauthored a widely cited AI paper, were unable to attend the meal; both are listed as founding advisors to Prometheus and continue to run their own startups, LinkedIn data and a person familiar with the matter indicate. None of the researchers responded to requests for comment.

Ozair created General Agents last year, and the San Francisco startup shipped its first technology in April. Described as “a realtime computer pilot,” Ace takes control of a computer and performs tasks based on a user’s prompts. The product belongs to a class of tools the AI industry calls computer agents, which automate workflows across different apps on a laptop.

A demo from the launch shows Ace downloading an image from Google and sending it to someone over iMessage in under 15 seconds.

How Ace will fit into Prometheus’ plans is unclear. New versions of Ace were released as recently as this month, public data from General Agents show. The company’s website and job postings remain live, and the leader of an India-based team that helped train Ace lists Prometheus on their LinkedIn profile.

Harsha Abegunasekara, cofounder and CEO of Donely, which offers a product that competes with Ace, says he learned about the General Agents acquisition from an investor in Ozair’s startup. The development has produced mixed reactions among Donely’s backers; some investors welcome the prospect of a well-regarded competitor exiting the field, others fret about competing against Bezos if Ace becomes a core component of Prometheus’ work.

“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.”