Bezos AI company poaches xAI co-founder from OpenAI

ME News update: On April 7 (UTC+8), the British newspaper The Financial Times reported that Jeff Bezos’ AI company Project Prometheus has hired Kyle Kosic, a co-founder of xAI. Kosic previously co-founded xAI with Musk and led the infrastructure buildout of the supercomputer Colossus. In 2024, he returned to his former employer OpenAI, and now has joined Prometheus to continue overseeing AI infrastructure.

Prometheus has been hiring hundreds of engineers and AI researchers at its headquarters in San Francisco and its offices in London and Zurich. According to people familiar with the matter, it has already “assembled the largest data corpus in the engineering field.” The company plans to acquire equity in companies in industries such as engineering, aviation, and construction, obtain data, and dispatch engineers to improve operations. Bezos and Vikram Bajaj, the co-CEO of Verily (formerly Google’s life sciences division) and a co-founder, are raising hundreds of billions of dollars for a “permanent capital vehicle.” People familiar with the matter liken it to a “Berkshire Hathaway-style holding company.” The company is currently in talks with sovereign wealth funds in Singapore and Gulf states about investments.

Kosic was one of the earlier departures among the 11 xAI co-founders by Musk; now all 11 have left. The last two, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, left at the end of March, and some people expressed dissatisfaction with Musk’s management style. (Source: Financial Times)