The UN doesn’t say that a human life is actually worth $10 million but that’s the number we’re going to use, so the question is as QALY thing how much is a liver transplant worth and it turns out the liver transplant gets you about 25 QALYs, and so running the numbers a liver is only about $3.75 million.
Wouldn't be surprised if the funding is based on a circular investment of some AI chipset vendor to consume the compute power of the chipsets AWS is buying.
"We buy this amount of chips at price xx, you guarantee us utilization in part by investing in an AI company we will create"
$6.2 billion which are prob to be invested in amazon to be invested in the startup to be invested in amazon, so I would not assume such an amount actually implies the size where this would be surprising.
There is pretty concrete published data that shows trends in less hiring for roles that are easily replaced by AI such as content writers and front-end developers
Personally I let go a developer I was using because I only had them around for front end work and now I'm much more productive just doing that with Claude Code directly
So the returns for the average business are largely due to less employee and contractors spending
Is that a thing in the US? You start a company and there's no need to register it with the government? Or it gets registered but there's no public records of it?
A company can be a sole proprietership or partnership without registering with anyone, but in this case in most states they must either conduct business in the owners/partners names or register a DBA with the state(s) they are doing business in. (the rules are state specific, and I think there are some states that don't do kr require DBA registration). In most cases, a company with billions invested in it will be formed as a formal entity such as an LLC or Corporation in a state. Again, the specifics vary from state to state. If you knew the legal name of this entity, and what syate it was registered in, you could probably look up when it was registered in that state.
However, details like owners and organizers aren't always Available.
It gets further complicated with Series LLCs.
Congress passed a law that would have required "beneficial ownership" registration with law enforcement (FinCen), however, this registration would not have been public.
Further, it was found unconstitutional and enforcement of the registration requirement indefinitely suspended.
In general, if you are doing business in a state under a name or entiry other than your own legal name, you will be required to file something with the state, and that filing will include a registered agent where legal process can be served on the business, and this information will be public.
But if they aren't doing business publicly yet, no one will know the name of the business, so they can't look it up! It sounds like the name mentioned in the article may just be a code name.
All companies are registered. They have to be registered to be legal entities, have bank accounts, and comply with tax laws.
Private companies don’t need to publicly divulge a lot, though. It’s between the company and their investors. It’s only once a company wants to trade publicly that they have to provide a lot of public details and financials.
You don’t have to register a general partnership as long as it has one of the partners’ last name in the partnership name, although I guess you have to get an EIN to file partnership taxes.
A sole proprietorship doesn’t have to register anything ever at all.
Although in most cases it’s sensible to register a single member LLC instead of operating as a sole proprietor. That way the LLC can be separate from the owner’s personal assets.
Great point. I suppose I should have said all companies like this (the corporation Bezos is involved with) are registered entities.
There are ways to do business activities yourself without registering an official business, though it’s generally discouraged because forming an LLC is so cheap and easy and provides some protections and benefits.
There are thousands of companies registered every day across the US. This one is probably a subdivision of a subdivision of some holding company owned by Bezos. Pretty much impossible to track using just public data.
You can basically form a corporate entity with a nominal Delaware office, but it doesn't need to give any details about where the actual work takes place, yeah.
Q: could this be an "experiment" in AI financing? i.e. he's bankrolled 6.2B, then strategic quasi-purchases and cross investments will multiply that money without ever needing to spend it on anything - except AWS hosting of course
> its work will resemble that of Periodic Labs, which is building technology to speed up scientific research by simulating the physical world to train AI models.
Will be interesting to see how far simulation gets you vs actual embodiment via robots, etc.
Despite the critiques that is something worthwhile I can understand, maybe there is a time in your life you want to be involved in something big, but not 100% like you were at your prime you have the opportunity to do it, so why not. You remain engaged. I prefer seeing that than doing nothing of something useless.
I think that’s a very mature, realistic take. Personally, if I was a 60 year old billionaire, I’d probably be having a series of long vacations or chilling in my yacht. It’s cool that bezos is still trying.
Notably, Amazon has already invested $8 billion in Anthropic/Claude, so I'm hoping this is actually something wildly different and with a different approach.
> Is "A.I." NYT house style? Looks rather jarring.
I think their style is to use periods for acronyms, which I believe is traditional. A quick scan of their recent headlines turns up "U.S", "A.I.", "A.T.M.", "ICE", "L.P.G.A.", "REI", "U.K." I don't know what the reasoning behind the use of "ICE" and "REI" is, could be a mistake or a judgement that those words are tend to not be understood as acronyms, or something else.
Looks to me like initialisms get periods unless they are acronyms or trademarks. So "ICE" is fine because it is read as "ice" and not I.C.E. (eye-see-ee). REI is not an initialism though, but presumably they have kept it as-is because it's their trademark/"doing business as" style.
IIRC they used to always style "NASA" as "N.A.S.A." even though the agency itself never uses periods and is of course always pronounced as a word rather than initials. (This particular example stuck in my mind just because I work there). Hopefully "ICE" and "REI" reflect a change in that style to omit periods when referring to organizations that omit the periods in their own style guides.
Haha.. busted. I do enjoy fashion blogs (specifically Tom and Lorenzo https://tomandlorenzo.com/) and always notice Bezos out galavanting around at the events they post!
Being a celebrity doesn't sound like it would take that much time, especially for someone like him who probably just is physically present for things and leaves all planning to others. In fact, being coCEO is probably literally just more of the same to him.
I thought startup was supposed to mean "we're still starting up our business", but it sounds like the meaning these days is closer to "we are setting piles of cash on fire".
I have a weird sense that this is a way to get his kids that are technical into a family business without having them work at a company that isn't considered prestigious
A lot of negative posts here, but AI to advance science seems like basically the best possible use case. The more ultrawealthy people who want to throw billions at it, the better.
Wasn't OpenAI also for the embetterment of society? Looking at how things went for all high profile AI companies, why should we trust this one? Even if they got a saint to run as CEO they would find a way to screw humanity over.
Wants all the power without actually doing the CEO's job. Quite ridiculous, similarly how there were two heads of "DOGE" or Twitter having Linda Yaccarino as the CEO.
I’ve met both. Even when I disagree with them I appreciate the ones that actually put the work in. Most recently I’ve worked with a string of them that barely understand how their companies make money and certainly couldn’t do any of the actual jobs there. Performance is independent from them being on the payroll.
setting aside the AWS DB offerring I've done 2 "Project: Aurora" in the past 3 years, and a bonus project "Audite" (make sure you say it correctly when execs are around!)
Look, I'm all for "big bets" but when the majority of time and effort goes into the naming, kick-off and t-shirt design, this ain't it.
Amazon itself has become so corrupted and disfunctional that all of their internal AI efforts amount to just burning billions for bottom-of-the-barrel results[0]. I'm not surprised that 5 person startups are building better AI products than all of Amazon, or that Bezos decided to start an AI company outside of Amazon.
It's really not surprising. AWS is definitely absolutely now in the category of "too big to fail". And the fact that there's an entire AWS region for US government classified stuff just underscores that.
Becoming TBTF has a very corrosive effect on organizations.
It’s free money. You spend 3billion and have more billions drop in from investors. You get to create great tech and then make 100s more billions drop from IPO. When the initial investment is a rounding error in your portfolio, it’s a crime to not do this
Realistically if they were capable of being happy doing something other than acquiring more currency they would never become billionaires. Any reasonable person would simply live life enjoying their 10s or 100s of millions.
It takes extraordinary skill to successfully juggle multiple ventures. So it is natural for some to want to take on the challenge. I think it is pretty impressive.
> It takes extraordinary skill to successfully juggle multiple ventures.
That's a myth. I've done that, and I know a lot of people who do that. Do you think Musk is writing sparse attention code for Grok? Does he even know how Grok's architecture works under the hood? Or that he designed the data centers? I mean, you delegate stuff. The only hard thing is getting the right people, but if you're a hyped up billionaire, it's easy mode because you can pay a lot, and people want to work for you. You just create an environment where they can achieve things.
There are times when the majority of your work is simply attending public meetings, podcasts, and doing interviews. People really overestimate what's involved in the work of a billionaire CEO. The people actually making things happen in space industry or AI work harder, longer, and solve more complex problems than any CEO and in some cases they need to work hard against the CEOs to actually make things happen.
And he's not juggling Blue Origin that well given the delays. Still impressive to go to space, so the man deserves credit, but it likely would have been several years faster and billions less if he had been more involved.
By pure nature of how companies work, a space company with this mandate and so much funding, unless its being used for money laundering, will have a modicum of progress. BO has barely had that. No space company with so much money and so much runway has achieved so little.
In the old days there was a saying "The only way Bill Gates could spend all his fortune is a manned mission to Mars."
Well, Bezos and Musk are trying that, and it turns out there is still a lot left to spend, so instead of helping the needy they do what is trendy for billionaires, which is build another AI company.
Amazon itself has become so corrupted and disfunctional that all of their internal AI efforts amount to just burning billions for bottom-of-the-barrel results[0]. I'm not surprised that 5 person startups are building better AI products than all of Amazon, or that Bezos decided to start an AI company outside of Amazon.
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"We buy this amount of chips at price xx, you guarantee us utilization in part by investing in an AI company we will create"
Any more details? Where is it located? Who is working there,
For $6.2 billion raised I’m surprised their aren’t more details
Personally I let go a developer I was using because I only had them around for front end work and now I'm much more productive just doing that with Claude Code directly
So the returns for the average business are largely due to less employee and contractors spending
However, details like owners and organizers aren't always Available.
It gets further complicated with Series LLCs.
Congress passed a law that would have required "beneficial ownership" registration with law enforcement (FinCen), however, this registration would not have been public.
Further, it was found unconstitutional and enforcement of the registration requirement indefinitely suspended.
In general, if you are doing business in a state under a name or entiry other than your own legal name, you will be required to file something with the state, and that filing will include a registered agent where legal process can be served on the business, and this information will be public.
But if they aren't doing business publicly yet, no one will know the name of the business, so they can't look it up! It sounds like the name mentioned in the article may just be a code name.
Private companies don’t need to publicly divulge a lot, though. It’s between the company and their investors. It’s only once a company wants to trade publicly that they have to provide a lot of public details and financials.
A sole proprietorship doesn’t have to register anything ever at all.
There are ways to do business activities yourself without registering an official business, though it’s generally discouraged because forming an LLC is so cheap and easy and provides some protections and benefits.
One of the more absurd things I can do is have two LLCs own each other, and then have outside management.
> its work will resemble that of Periodic Labs, which is building technology to speed up scientific research by simulating the physical world to train AI models.
Will be interesting to see how far simulation gets you vs actual embodiment via robots, etc.
Probably because they're not continuous?
I think their style is to use periods for acronyms, which I believe is traditional. A quick scan of their recent headlines turns up "U.S", "A.I.", "A.T.M.", "ICE", "L.P.G.A.", "REI", "U.K." I don't know what the reasoning behind the use of "ICE" and "REI" is, could be a mistake or a judgement that those words are tend to not be understood as acronyms, or something else.
He just paid for Kris Jenner's 70th birthday party at his house where they had the cops called on them: https://www.realtor.com/news/celebrity-real-estate/kris-jenn...
and he disinvited Elon Musk (lol): https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/celebrity/articles/elon-...
Here he is out showboating at the Oscars, Vanity Fair parties, the white house, in Hollywood, in Monaco, Paris Fashion Week, Sun Valley, Milan, NYC, various galas all in the last year: https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-fa...
I don't have this treasure trove of information about Bezos' life and I don't think it makes me any less informed about the world?
New AI co, Bezos as co-CEO (alongside Vik Bajaj, ex-Google X)
$6.2b in funding
Nearly 100 employees
AI + real world scientific experiments, for the engineering and manufacturing of computers, automobiles and spacecraft
I thought startup was supposed to mean "we're still starting up our business", but it sounds like the meaning these days is closer to "we are setting piles of cash on fire".
Lifestyle distractions aside, Bezos playing any kind of CEO role is probably a good thing.
I don't have a lot of hope that it's the former, to be honest. These people have burned up all their goodwill.
In other words he wants to seagull manage the place.
> actual work
Doesn't compute.
What is it about tech people and being unable to come up with original names?
Every company I have worked for has had two dozen internal tools and projects called "Prometheus".
Look, I'm all for "big bets" but when the majority of time and effort goes into the naming, kick-off and t-shirt design, this ain't it.
Reminds me of Matt Levine joking about walking into a hedge fund with a SEC jacket memorabilia.
[0]https://labs.amazon.science/
Becoming TBTF has a very corrosive effect on organizations.
I don't get this new Musk-like tendency to run multiple ventures instead of focusing on one very tough mission.
That's a myth. I've done that, and I know a lot of people who do that. Do you think Musk is writing sparse attention code for Grok? Does he even know how Grok's architecture works under the hood? Or that he designed the data centers? I mean, you delegate stuff. The only hard thing is getting the right people, but if you're a hyped up billionaire, it's easy mode because you can pay a lot, and people want to work for you. You just create an environment where they can achieve things.
There are times when the majority of your work is simply attending public meetings, podcasts, and doing interviews. People really overestimate what's involved in the work of a billionaire CEO. The people actually making things happen in space industry or AI work harder, longer, and solve more complex problems than any CEO and in some cases they need to work hard against the CEOs to actually make things happen.
blue origin vs spacex says otherwise..
Although I wish billionaires would fix homelessness, I think its good there’s more competition in the space launch industry.
Well, Bezos and Musk are trying that, and it turns out there is still a lot left to spend, so instead of helping the needy they do what is trendy for billionaires, which is build another AI company.
[0]https://labs.amazon.science/