Jeff Bezos says AI won’t destroy jobs. He then launched a company to create artificial engineers

Jeff Bezos is one of the representative figures of current technological optimism regarding artificial intelligence. While in the United States we are seeing the university students who boo to those who claim that AI is the new industrial revolution due to pessimism when it comes to finding a job, Bezos point that this pessimism around AI is “the opposite of reality.” Come on, young people are wrong because what AI is going to do is create jobs.

At the same time, Bezos has returned to talk of Prometheusa startup that will open the door to fewer workers being needed… while increasing productivity. It’s a bit of a mess, but it makes sense to Bezos.

Prometheus. It is not a model or a technology, but a startup. Founded by Bezos in 2024, it has about 150 employees spread across headquarters in San Francisco, London and Zurich and already has a valuation of $41 billion. The central purpose of Prometheus is to develop AI systems capable of assisting in the entire engineering process from start to finish (end to end, as they call it).

This means that the system will cover from the initial design of physical products to their manufacturing and launch, passing through all the simulation and testing phases. It is like a kind of artificial general engineer and does not seek to be just something that supports the engineers, who will then create the physical products. His goal is… that, to be a physical engineer.

Accelerate inventions. Beszos’ goal is to empower engineers to be able to invent things more quickly and easily. An example is that this AI product is capable of carrying out all the aforementioned steps to build, for example, a jet engine.

And here is the twist, since a jet engine is something extremely complex, but what Bezos is looking for is that what the startup develops allows smaller teams to do much bigger things in much shorter cycle times. Landing it: if before 100 people made you a new generation jet engine, now 10 can make it for you.

I don’t know, Rick.… We suppose that in his head it is a good way to reassure those young people worried about the future of work, but in case it is not clear, Bezos commented that the fear of AI and the future of work is “the opposite of reality”, pointing out that what Prometheus does will be a catalyst for work. The curious thing is that he has presented it in a slightly strange way.

If AI makes work cheaper, faster and easier, employment will increase because, “even though the number of people needed is being reduced by 10, technology will create opportunities to multiply those jobs by 10.” They are a bit strange accounts, but the boss of Amazon gives as an example a two-person household in which only one will have to work because productivity thanks to AI will be much greater.

It does not say what that other person will do or if, thanks to AI, that member of the household who continues to work will earn more to replace one who stays at home. What it suggests is that there will be such a massive increase in productivity that not everyone will have to work, a somewhat questionable message because bills are not paid with productivity, but with money.

colossal background. But well, beyond Bezos’ curious message, Prometheus is valued at $41 billion and has raised $12 billion from investors such as JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs and BlackRock, apart from Bezos himself. And, currently, it is in deals to raise a fund of 100,000 million.

But Bezos isn’t the only one moving to build AI startups. We have the founders of Uber, Coinbase or Robinhood (curious name) building new companies around this technology boom due to something that these profiles are very clear about: It is a new golden era and the best way to start a company.

Young Americans are not so clear.

In Xataka | Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, on the possibility that we are facing a work apocalypse: “It’s nonsense”