Bezos and Bajaj on Prometheus: Live updates

Bezos doubled down on Blue Origin’s ambitious timeline to return its New Glenn rocket to flight by the end of the year.

Last month, one of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rockets blew up during a static fire test at a Space Force launch facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

“It was a very difficult event, a very bad day for Blue Origin, very tough on the whole team,” Bezos said.

Blue Origin is working to restore the launch site, Bezos said. The startup “got lucky in a bunch of ways,” including that the longest lead items were undamaged by the explosion, he said.

“We’ll be flying again before the end of this year,” Bezos said.

—Annie Palmer

Bezos said he’ll be “watching along with the rest of you,” when asked if he’ll be keeping an eye on SpaceX’s IPO, which starts trading Friday.

— CJ Haddad

Bezos said that advancements in artificial intelligence won’t kill jobs in the U.S. economy — and will instead improve Americans’ standard of living to the point that a household with two earners could rely on just one income.

Bezos said AI would boost productivity significantly in the U.S. economy, thereby raising the standard of living and the “basket of goods people can afford.”

“A lot of people who for example today have two-earner households, perhaps one of those earners will choose not to be in the job market, so they’ll become a one-earner household,” Bezos said. “Maybe some people who are working overtime will stop working overtime, because they don’t want to work overtime.”

In 2024, both spouses were employed in nearly 50% of married couples, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In families with children, two-thirds of all households had both spouses working outside the home.

Asked about efforts to regulate AI, Bezos said “reasonable” laws are needed, but he cautioned against regulation that could stifle innovation or halt AI development.

He pointed to government regulation of drug development and airlines as examples where laws help ensure that products are developed safely.

“There’s a lot to be said for healthy government regulation to improve safety and products and so on,” Bezos said. “I don’t see why that won’t be applied at some point to the kinds of new tools that are being built by AI, but when you do that, you want to regulate the application level. You don’t want to accidentally outlaw the knife because it can be used in a bad way.”

He added, “Knives are important tools and yes, every once and a while they get misused by someone. But the solution to that isn’t to say, ‘OK, no more data centers. No more knives.’ That’s not a smart approach to regulation.”

—Annie Palmer

Bezos said he has “a very different view” when asked about concerns about AI and job losses, adding that AI will bring “significant productivity” to the economy that will raise the standard of living.

“They’re pessimistic because a bunch of smart people are telling them to be pessimistic, but those people are wrong,” he said about public blowback against AI.

—CJ Haddad

Bezos is pulling back the curtain on what’s really going on at Prometheus — and said the company isn’t working on robots.

“There’s been some speculation,” he said. “We thought, look, we’re not being secretive, right? We’re just being heads down and trying to do the work, but … when you raise this much money, people do get curious.”

Rumors have swirled that Prometheus is working on robots, but Bezos said the company is creating AI for invention and physical engineering.

— Samantha Subin

Bezos said he participated in Prometheus’ series B, after contributing a chunk of capital in its first fundraising round.

The startup has shared few details about its other backers.

“We’ve raised money, we have a brilliant team, we have tremendous work ahead of us,” Bezos said.

— Annie Palmer

Bezos, who also leads a space company and serves as executive chair at Amazon after stepping down as CEO in 2021, says he’s allotting most of his time to artificial intelligence.

“Prometheus is the bulk of my time,” the billionaire said. “I’m also spending a lot of time on Blue [Origin]. I’m spending a lot of time on AI at Amazon. So the common thread in my time spent is mostly AI.”

— Samantha Subin

Bezos said it’s “easy to imagine” Prometheus being a customer of Amazon’s cloud business as it requires more compute capacity.

“It’s easy to imagine Amazon or any hyperscaler using the kinds of tools” that Prometheus is developing to improve their data centers,” he added.

Bezos added that his two companies would remain “at arm’s length.”

“We actually have compute from a multitude of sources,” he said. “So we need to, right now, compute is scarce enough that you get it where you can, including AWS.”

— Annie Palmer

Bezos said Prometheus is building a system that can accelerate the “invention loop,” so that people can build tools faster.

“This is an age-old dream,” Bezos said. “The idea that you might build a set of tools that could actually do engineering, an artificial general engineer. It’s a dream that we’ve had, as people thought about for decades, but it’s never really been possible. But now it is, and that’s what we’ve been working on since late 2024.”

He said Prometheus has assembled a team of about 150 people.

“It’s hard work, we’re grinding, but it’s also very interesting,” Bezos said.

— Annie Palmer

Bezos’ AI startup Prometheus raised $12 billion in series B funding, valuing the company at roughly $41 billion.

—Annie Palmer

Bezos’ Blue Origin was dealt a setback last month when one of its New Glenn rockets erupted into a fireball during a hot-fire test at a Space Force launch facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

During the test, Blue Origin’s massive reusable rocket was secured to the launchpad, while its engines were ignited to make sure they worked properly in preparation for an upcoming launch.

The test didn’t go as planned, and the rocket exploded.

Bezos said at the time that it’s “too early to know the root cause but we’re already working to find it. Very rough day, but we’ll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It’s worth it.”

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told CNBC earlier this month that it will “take some serious time” to restore the launchpad.

Blue Origin had just returned New Glenn to the launchpad after an April incident where the company delivered an AST SpaceMobile satellite into the wrong orbit.

The New Glenn rocket was set to ferry a batch of 48 satellites for Amazon’s nascent Leo internet-from-space venture.

—Annie Palmer

Prometheus has mostly operated in stealth since its launch in November, sharing few details about its objectives or potential product pipeline.

Bezos offered a rare window into Prometheus when he spoke to CNBC last month. He said the company has “nothing to do with robotics,” and that it’s developing an artificial general engineer.

“We’re building tools that will make it much easier for engineers to design physical objects,” Bezos said.

He described the system as a “very, very modern version” of CAD, or computer-aided design software, though he cautioned that he’s “really oversimplifying here, and it’s premature for me to give much detail about Prometheus.”

Prometheus operates out of San Francisco, London and Zurich, Switzerland. Prometheus’ LinkedIn page states that the startup has hired about 120 employees.

The page says Prometheus’ mission is “AI for the physical economy.”

—Annie Palmer

Prometheus marks the first time Bezos has assumed a CEO role since he left the helm of Amazon, which he founded, in July 2021. Bezos remains Amazon’s executive chairman, but he has increasingly turned his attention to other pursuits.

Bezos founded Blue Origin, a rocket startup that competes with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for government contracts and satellite launch missions. He’s also executive chair of the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion climate and biodiversity fund.

—Annie Palmer

Bezos told CNBC last month that AI has been a huge part of his focus over the last few years.

“My time at Amazon is spent on AI, my time at Prometheus is spent on AI … and my time at Blue is largely spent on AI,” he said.

—Chris Eudaily