Bezos AI company poaches xAI co-founder from OpenAI

ME News update: On April 7 (UTC+8), the UK’s Financial Times reported that Project Prometheus, an AI company under Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, 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 has now 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, and according to people familiar with the matter, it has “assembled the largest data corpus in the engineering field.” The company plans to acquire equity stakes in businesses in industries such as engineering, aviation, and construction to obtain data and deploy engineers to improve operations. Bezos and Vikram Bajaj, the co-founder of Verily (formerly Google’s life sciences division) and co-CEO, are raising hundreds of billions of dollars for a “permanent capital vehicle,” with people familiar with the matter comparing it to a “Berkshire Hathaway-style holding company.” The company is currently in talks with sovereign wealth funds in Singapore and the Gulf states about investing.

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