Bezos AI company poaches xAI co-founder from OpenAI

According to monitoring from 1M AI News, the Financial Times reported that an AI company under Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—Project Prometheus—has hired Kyle Kosic, a co-founder of xAI. Kosic previously co-founded xAI with Musk and oversaw the infrastructure buildout for the supercomputer Colossus. In 2024, he returned to his former employer, OpenAI, and has now joined Prometheus to continue overseeing AI infrastructure.

Prometheus has been hiring hundreds of engineers and AI researchers at its headquarters in San Francisco, as well as in its offices in London and Zurich. According to people familiar with the matter, it has already “assembled the largest data corpus in the engineering field.” The company plans to acquire equity stakes in companies in industries such as engineering, aerospace, and construction, to obtain data and dispatch engineers to improve operations. Bezos and Vikram Bajaj, the co-CEO and co-founder of Verily (formerly Google’s life sciences division), are raising hundreds of billions of dollars for a “permanent capital instrument.” People familiar with the matter compare it to a “Berkshire Hathaway-style holding company.” The company is currently in talks with sovereign wealth funds in Singapore and the Gulf states about investments.

Kosic was one of the earlier departures among Musk’s 11 xAI co-founders. Now, all 11 have left; the last two, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, departed at the end of March. Some people have expressed dissatisfaction with Musk’s management style.