After the Modern York Times article was published, Guss, Ozair and about three dozen others updated their LinkedIn profiles to list their connections to the Bezos venture. Several of these people also work at Foresite Labs.
Details about Prometheus remain constrained. The date of establishment, official name and headquarters of the company have not been made public. But a dinner Bajaj hosted in June provided other clues.
At least two other guests on the night, including former Nvidia senior scientist Kamyar Azizzadenesheli, quietly joined Prometheus earlier this year, according to their newly updated LinkedIn profiles.
Ashish Vaswani and Jakob Uszkoreit, two former Google researchers who co-authored the notable article on artificial intelligence, were unable to attend the dinner. However, the two are now founding advisors to Prometheus while running their own startups, according to LinkedIn and a person familiar with the matter. Neither researcher responded to requests for comment.
Built for speed
Ozair founded General Agents last year, and the San Francisco startup released its first technology last April. Described as a “real-time computer remote control”, Ace takes control of the computer and performs actions based on the user’s commands. It belongs to a class of tools that the AI industry calls computer agents, which can automate everyday laptop tasks that span a variety of applications.
One demo video from the launch shows Ace downloading an image from Google and sending it to another person via iMessage in less than 15 seconds.
It’s still unclear how Ace fits into Prometheus’ plans. According to.up-to-date versions of Ace continue to be released later this month public data from general agents. The company’s website and job postings remain online, and the leader of the team in India helping to train Ace has also joined Prometheus, according to their LinkedIn profile
Harsha Abegunasekara, co-founder and CEO Readywhich makes Ace a competitor, claims that it learned about the General Agents acquisition from an investor in the startup Ozair. The deal was mixed for Donely. Some potential investors are content to see a respected rival off the board, while others worry about facing Bezos if Ace becomes a key part of Prometheus’ development.
“There is something important for Prometheus to take over the entire company,” Abegunasekara says. “What General Agents really cracked early on was speed – Ace runs on your computer at the speed of light. We’ve been working on it for six months and we’re not there yet.”