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A company owned by Jeff Bezos has poached an xAI co-founder from a role at OpenAI, as the tech billionaire’s secretive start-up rapidly recruits to pursue its ambition to create AI systems that can transform the industrial sector.
Kyle Kosic has joined Project Prometheus, a code name for the new company led by Bezos and former Google executive Vikram Bajaj, according to people familiar with the matter.
A co-founder of xAI alongside Elon Musk, Kosic led the infrastructure team behind its Colossus supercomputer before returning to his former employer OpenAI in 2024. He will continue to work on AI infrastructure projects at Prometheus, the people said.
His move marks the latest in a dizzying round of job changes as AI labs compete fiercely for top talent, often offering substantial salaries to lure staff from rivals.
Musk has seen all 11 of his xAI co-founders leave, with several departing in recent months, and some with complaints about Musk’s management. The last two, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, left the company at the end of March, according to people familiar with the matter as first reported by Business Insider.
Prometheus, meanwhile, has hired hundreds of staff at its headquarters in San Francisco and in its offices in London and Zurich. It has focused on hiring engineers, AI researchers and people with experience in “building out massive infrastructure projects”, one person familiar with its hiring said.
The start-up, launched by Bezos last year, is working on AI systems that can operate in the physical world and go beyond the language-based systems behind chatbots like ChatGPT or coding tools like Claude Code.
Project Prometheus declined to comment.
The company is particularly focused on the industrial sector. It envisions a model that can understand the laws of physics and is trained on data from specific domains, such as jet engine design, one person close to the company said.
They added that the company had already “assembled the largest corpus of data on engineering” and how such systems work.
Prometheus also plans to amass stakes in companies across sectors such as engineering, aviation, architecture and design. Those deals would include gathering data from these companies, which could be used to improve the start-up’s AI model.
Bezos and Bajaj are personally leading Prometheus’s efforts to raise tens of billions of dollars or more for a “permanent capital vehicle” that would acquire equity stakes in companies likely to be disrupted by AI in the future.
One person compared it to a “Berkshire Hathaway-type holding company”.
“Prometheus wants to back the progress of these industries, which will happen eventually with AI, but they don’t want it to take 10 years,” the person added.
The start-up plans to have its staff working within these companies, often known as “forward deployed engineers”. The investment and input from staff, it hopes, will improve margins and operations at the companies.
The AI industry has struggled to create models that truly understand physical space due to a lack of high-quality data that represents the real world, rather than more readily available text and computer code.
Competitors’ current efforts involve training on video data and simulations to mimic real-world environments.
Prometheus is also discussing investments in this vehicle with sovereign investment funds, including from Singapore and Gulf nations, multiple people said.