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Jeff Bezos says AI will bring ‘golden ages’ not mass job losses

Amazon founder lays out vision for new $41bn AI lab Prometheus

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Cristina Criddle and George Hammond in San Francisco

Published13 hours ago

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Jeff Bezos has dismissed predictions that AI will lead to mass job destruction, arguing instead that the technology will help usher in “multiple golden ages”.

The Amazon founder told the FT that his new $41bn AI lab Prometheus would use the technology to transform manufacturing and engineering.

Outlining his vision for Prometheus, the first company he has led since stepping down as head of Amazon in 2021, Bezos fired back at warnings that AI would decimate the employment market.

“The people who are jumping to the conclusion that the jobs are all going to go away . . . I think these people are just wrong,” said Bezos, the world’s fourth-richest person.

Bezos is betting that AI will be a boon across his sprawling business empire, spanning space exploration, robotics, delivery, cloud computing and longevity research. “All of the things that I work on today have something to do with AI,” he said.

“We’re in the middle of multiple golden ages right now, certainly with AI . . . But I think it’s true of space also, and other areas like biotech,” said Bezos. “I think you’re going to see a whole bunch of incredible miracles unfold here in the next decade.”

Blue Origin, Bezos’s rocketmaker, “is a perfect example of a company that would be greatly benefited” by Prometheus’ tools, he added, without detailing their capabilities.

But Prometheus, launched last November by Bezos and Vikram Bajaj, co-chief executive and a former Google executive, has yet to unveil its tool and faces competition from a host of start-ups developing AI-powered products for physical processes.

Jeff Bezos sits at a table during an interview with the FT, looking forward as another person smiles beside him.Jeff Bezos, left, and Vikram Bajaj, co-chief executive of Prometheus, launched the AI venture last November© Prometheus

Blue Origin, meanwhile, lags behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the commercial space race. Musk’s company is targeting a $1.78tn valuation in a public listing on Friday, while Blue Origin suffered a big setback last month when one of its rockets exploded during a test.

Prometheus has raised $12bn from investors, including JPMorgan Chase, BlackRock and Bezos himself, giving it a valuation of $41bn including that capital. The FT first reported the funding round.

The company aims to build an “artificial general engineer”, training the system on real-world data to develop an understanding of physics beyond the large language models that underpin popular AI products today.

Despite broad fears that AI will destroy a huge number of jobs, Bezos believes it will create a labour shortage — spurring the creation of far more new jobs than it wipes out.

“At root, all civilisational wealth is driven by invention. Six thousand years ago, somebody invented the plough, and we all got wealthier,” Bezos said.

Other AI leaders are more bearish on its labour market effects. Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic, has repeatedly warned that the technology his company is building could wipe out swaths of the workforce.

In an essay on Wednesday, Amodei, whose company is backed by Amazon, proposed higher capital gains taxes to fund universal basic income as a response to a possible jobs apocalypse.

Prometheus wants to shorten design and manufacturing pipelines, reducing physical prototyping. To do so, it plans to leverage data from traditional engineering and manufacturing companies it acquires stakes in via a dedicated holding company that Bezos and Bajaj are raising up to $100bn for, the FT previously reported.

The company has hired hundreds of employees across physical engineering disciplines, and poached staff from rival AI companies, including OpenAI, xAI, and Meta.

AI firms have been battling for scarce talent in the field. Mark Zuckerberg was rumoured to have delivered handmade soup to a potential hire from OpenAI to lure them to join Meta, prompting similar responses from other tech companies.

“If they want me to make soup for them, I will. That request has not been made,” Bezos said.

Bajaj said talented workers would flock to Prometheus over competitors because of “Jeff’s philosophy of customer ambition” and a “deep empathy for the unsung heroes who are engineers that really build the world around us”.

“Our lives depend on them and the amount that they can dream,” he added.

Bezos said tackling the vast area of manufacturing was a “daunting challenge” and that his vision was to “empower engineers all over the world to do their best work and to do it faster and to get the products into the world”.

Additional reporting by Rafe Rosner-Uddin

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