Bezos' Prometheus Raises $12B, America Inc. Moves to Texas, Trucking Rebounds | Diet TBPN

**John Coogan** (0:02)
Bezos is getting very serious about the AI game. $12 billion raised for Prometheus. It's just been six months since he emerged from stealth with $6.2 billion in funding. The industrial AI startup, as they're calling it, raised another $12 billion in Series B. It's just 1,000 times bigger than a normal Series A and a Series B. You used to go from $6 million Series A, to $12 million Series B. Now, it's $6 billion Series A, $12 billion Series B. Serious dollars, but AI is expensive. The valuation, $41 billion.
Back in November, there was very little disclosed about Prometheus. We wrote about it a little. There was some speculation on the time.

**Jordi Hays** (0:46)
41?

**John Coogan** (0:47)
41 billion. Bigger than, what's a $40 billion company?

**Jordi Hays** (0:53)
And this is a business that is buying existing companies?

**John Coogan** (0:57)
That's the thing. We don't really know. But it's a lot of money. It could be buying companies and trying to transform them.

**Jordi Hays** (1:02)
Well, being able to raise that much capital to buy businesses with that little dilution is a pretty remarkable feat that pretty much only Jeff Bezos could pull off.

**John Coogan** (1:11)
So, The Wall Street Journal has some more details, and mostly it just gives you, takes you a little bit more inside the mind of Jeff Bezos and how he's thinking about the shape of the AI impact. The headline is very clear. Bezos bats down AI job loss fears while launching new venture, new startup Prometheus seeks to build an artificial general engineer.
AGE is the new buzzword. You thought we were running out of them. We got AI, AGI, ASI, RSI, AI FDE, personal super intelligence, meta super intelligence, TBD, continual learning.

**Jordi Hays** (1:55)
Standard intelligence.

**John Coogan** (1:57)
Yep.

**Jordi Hays** (1:57)
Irregular intelligence. Non-standard, ineffable intelligence. The irregular super intelligence company.

**John Coogan** (2:04)
Of the dog patch.

**Jordi Hays** (2:05)
The dog patch.

**John Coogan** (2:06)
Something like that.
But artificial general engineer is the new phrase, the new term, and he wants it to be able to design and manufacture complex physical products. So Jeff Bezos expects artificial intelligence to create a labor shortage in the economy.
Interesting. There's some correlation between like liquid net worth and your projection of your optimism, right? Yeah. So he expects a labor shortage, rejecting fears that fast evolving technology will put humans out of work as he launches a new venture aimed at making engineers more productive. The billionaire founder of amazon.com, and don't forget Blue Origin, is co-leading a new AI business called Prometheus, which plans to build an artificial general engineer that can design and manufacture complex physical products, such as a jet engine. He said in an interview that the company's goal is to, quote, empower engineers and make innovation easier and faster so smaller teams can do much bigger things on much shorter time cycles. That would be good. It takes forever to build a jet engine. It takes forever to build a plane. We've talked to multiple founders that have been trying to build new plane designs for decades and haven't really been able to scale them up, although they've made incredible gains in traction and demos. Actually getting new planes on the runway safely approved has been far too long. If AI speeds it up by 10%, that's like years. It's crazy. The Amazon and Blue Origin co-founder joins a group of longtime technology leaders that have jumped into the AI fray. You got Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong, Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev, also Brian Chesky over at Airbnb. These folks are all building new companies around the AI boom, among others. Prometheus, which said it is valued at about $41 billion, has raised $12 billion from investors, including Bezos, JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and BlackRock. It went straight to the big banks.

**Jordi Hays** (4:03)
Yeah.

**John Coogan** (4:05)
Invest VCs are just like, yeah.

**Jordi Hays** (4:08)
There's another world where doing six on 40 billion is just like your IPO.

**John Coogan** (4:14)
Totally.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:14)
Yeah.

**John Coogan** (4:14)
That is IPO numbers. That's a crazy amount of money.

**SPEAKER_3** (4:17)
Yeah.

**John Coogan** (4:18)
You got to go to the banks for this. They've hired 150 people across San Francisco, London, and Zurich. Interesting. Despite Silicon Valley's enthusiasm for AI's promise, the broader population has become very wary, fearing widespread job losses. Some of the pessimism about AI among young people is the opposite of reality, Bezos said. And we've been seeing this in the jobs numbers, like the economy is running hot, inflation is high, but also unemployment is very low, lower than expected. We're adding a lot of jobs. AI will mean fewer workers are needed in jobs that exist today, but it will also create far more opportunities and increase productivity, he said. That's a very white pilling statement. Bezos argued that if AI makes it cheaper, faster and easier to invent things, employment will ultimately rise because even though you're shrinking the number of people needed by 10X, the technology will create more than 10X as many opportunities. And he certainly saw that with Amazon, the number of, you know, store workers in physical retail stores probably shrunk, but the number of entrepreneurs building products, selling them on Amazon in and around the Amazon ecosystem, not just in the warehouse, but in the broader Amazon ecosystem probably increased. And we certainly saw that in the broad job numbers in the United States. Like the labor market has grown unequivocally since 1999 We've added jobs all over the place as people have shifted around. There's going to be two earner income households where one earner drops out of the labor pool because there's going to be so much productivity, he said. That's an interesting take. He's saying that there's going to be so much more productivity that some people will choose out to work and of course that won't necessarily show up in the unemployment rate because the unemployment rate only measures people that are actively looking for jobs so you could have a world where the workforce is shrinking in terms of the number of people that have typical jobs is declining but the unemployment rate is also very low because you have more single earner households, one person working making more than enough money to support the whole family. Sort of an older school mindset, carcans back to the maybe apocryphal stories about the mid 20th century but certainly an optimistic view nonetheless.