By The war for top artificial intelligence talent just escalated. A highly secretive start-up owned by Jeff Bezos has successfully poached Kyle Kosic—a co-founder of Elon Musk’s xAI—away from his recent role at OpenAI.
Kosic is joining “Project Prometheus,” an ambitious new venture led by Bezos and former Google executive Vikram Bajaj. Kosic previously led the infrastructure team behind xAI’s massive Colossus supercomputer before returning to OpenAI in 2024. Now, insiders report he will be spearheading AI infrastructure projects for Prometheus.
This high-profile hire is the latest move in a fierce game of musical chairs among AI giants, where companies are throwing out massive salaries to lure top engineers away from their rivals. It also marks a rough milestone for Elon Musk’s xAI, which has now reportedly lost all 11 of its original co-founders, with several recent departures linked to complaints about Musk’s management style.
Beyond Chatbots: AI for the Physical World
While OpenAI and Anthropic are battling over language models and coding assistants, Project Prometheus is taking an entirely different route. They are building AI systems designed to understand and operate within the physical world, specifically targeting the industrial sector.
Instead of writing poetry or code, Prometheus wants its models to understand the laws of physics. The company is training its systems on highly specific domain data, such as jet engine design. Insiders claim the start-up has already quietly assembled the world’s largest database of engineering information.
To support this massive undertaking, Prometheus has been aggressively hiring hundreds of engineers, AI researchers, and heavy-infrastructure experts across its offices in San Francisco, London, and Zurich.
The “Berkshire Hathaway” of AI
Perhaps the most fascinating part of Project Prometheus is its aggressive business model. Bezos and Bajaj aren’t just building a tech company; they are orchestrating a massive financial play.
The duo is personally leading efforts to raise tens of billions of dollars to create a “permanent capital vehicle.” The strategy is to operate like an AI-powered Berkshire Hathaway, buying up significant equity stakes in legacy companies across aviation, engineering, architecture, and design.
This is a brilliant two-way street: by buying into these companies, Prometheus secures access to highly valuable, proprietary industrial data to further train its physical AI models. In return, Prometheus will use its cutting-edge AI to rapidly modernize those same businesses.
As one insider put it, Prometheus knows AI will eventually revolutionize the industrial world, but they are building the financial and technological muscle to ensure it happens now, rather than taking another ten years.