Jeff Bezos said he expects artificial intelligence to create a “labor shortage in the economy,” rejecting fears that the 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 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.
Bezos said in an interview that the company’s goal is “to empower engineers and make an invention easier and faster, so smaller teams can do much bigger things on much shorter time cycles.”
The Amazon and Blue Origin co-founder joins a group of longtime technology leaders that have jumped into the AI fray. Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick, Coinbase co-founder Brian Armstrong and Robinhood co-founder Vlad Tenev 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, JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock. It has hired about 150 people across offices in San Francisco, London and Zurich.
Despite Silicon Valley’s enthusiasm for AI’s promise, the broader population has become wary, fearing widespread job losses.
Some of the pessimism about AI among young people is “the opposite of reality,” Bezos said. 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.
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.
“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.
Bezos is co-CEO of the new company along with Vik Bajaj, a Google veteran and former healthcare founder and investor. Bezos and Bajaj started Prometheus in late 2024.
Bajaj, an adjunct professor at Stanford’s School of Medicine who previously co-founded Google’s life sciences division, said the company’s goal is to build AI systems that can assist throughout the entire engineering process. That ranges from designing products and predicting their performance to manufacturing them. 
“We’re trying to approach that problem end to end,” he said.
Prometheus has also held talks to raise a $100 billion fund, The Wall Street Journal has reported, to acquire manufacturing businesses and deploy AI across their operations. If raised, it would be the latest in a series of investors buying established companies and using AI to improve productivity and margins.
AI’s advances have paved the way for “a multitude of golden ages” happening simultaneously, Bezos said. “This is the best time to start a company.”