Jeff Bezos is ready to open up about Prometheus, the secretive AI startup he’s leading with former Google X executive Vik Bajaj.

In his first CEO role since handing over the reins of Amazon in 2021, the tech billionaire said in an interview that he had raised $12 billion to build an AI “physical world” lab, which is emerging Thursday from stealth, valued at $41 billion.

In addition to Bezos’ personal investment, other backers include JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, and venture-capital firms DST Global and Arch Venture Partners.

Prometheus aims to do for engineering and manufacturing what large language models have done for text. Building what Bezos called an “artificial general engineer,” it wants to be a real-world version of the LLMs OpenAI and Anthropic built by distilling a sea of words on the internet. Prometheus is instead ingesting information from the physical world to accelerate the manufacturing of everything from skyscrapers to smartphones to jet engines.

“Something that today was going to take 100 engineers 10 years to build, if you can change that to taking 10 engineers one year to build, you’re just going to get way more things built,” Bezos said in an interview.