Abstract:
On August 26, according to Reuters, he was invited to join Project, an AI company supported by Bezos. Two researchers from Prometheus chose to start their own business and launched a physical AI system that is different from mainstream large language models. Accelerated Understanding Inc says the model can handle 5 trillion units of data at a time, about 5 million times the amount of data that Anthropic and Google's flagship models can typically handle.
Accelerated Understanding was co-founded by Caltech professor of computational and mathematical sciences Anima Anandkumar and AI infrastructure engineer Benedikt Jenik. Unlike models such as ChatGPT that are trained around language data, the company's AI does not have the primary goal of understanding and generating text, but is used to predict changes in physical phenomena in space and time.
In terms of technical route, this system does not use the Transformer architecture commonly used in current large language models, but is based on the **Neural Operators** technology that Anandkumar previously participated in the development of to process physical data. Anandkumar said that compared with language-centered AI, this route attempts to put physical laws at the core of model capabilities.
The company hopes to bring this technology to the enterprise market first. Taking chip design as an example, the idea is to use AI to model physical factors such as materials and temperature, thereby reducing trial and error in the laboratory. In addition, the company also plans to use related technologies for robotics, extreme weather prediction, and geological data analysis in the energy industry.
Accelerated Understanding co-founders Anima Anandkumar and Benedikt Jenik
It is worth noting that the two founders have previously received invitations from Bezos-related AI projects. Meeting minutes and documents seen by Reuters show that at the end of 2024, investor and biotech entrepreneur Vik Bajaj, who later co-founded Project Prometheus with Bezos, discussed cooperation with Anandkumar and Jenik.
According to an invitation document called "Project Prometheus" seen by Reuters, Anandkumar was proposed to serve as the company's public representative and director, and be responsible for the scientific vision; she and Jenik can obtain 35% of the company's shares, and their combined annual salary is US$1 million, which will increase to US$2 million after three months of work. The document also mentioned that investors including Bezos plan to provide more than US$2 billion in pre-Series B financing.
However, the two ultimately did not join the project, but continued to develop Accelerated Understanding. Since then, Bezos and Bajaj have continued to promote Project Prometheus. The company completed a $12 billion Series B financing in June 2026. Its direction is to use AI to automate the manufacturing process of complex physical systems.
Anandkumar previously worked as a scientist at Amazon and joined Nvidia in 2018. Since then, he has served as a director of Nvidia for five years. She said that Nvidia CEO Huang Renxun had encouraged it to continue to promote research related to neural operators. In early research, his team explored the use of AI to accelerate weather prediction and achieved prediction accuracy comparable to traditional complex calculation methods.
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