Hi Dotikers!

Yesterday, Dario Amodei was asking the state for the power to unplug models deemed too dangerous, backing his essay with a $350 million fund dedicated to mass unemployment. Twenty-four hours later, Jeff Bezos responded with a far bigger check and the exact opposite conviction.

His company Prometheus, co-founded with Vik Bajaj, formerly of Google's Verily, has just raised $12 billion at a $41 billion valuation. It's the second round in a matter of months: launched in November with $6.2 billion, the company has quadrupled in value without showing anything concrete. On the menu: an "artificial general engineer," software meant to design and manufacture complex physical objects, from jet engines to drug molecules. A hundred and fifty people, offices in San Francisco, London and Zurich, and total silence about what's already running.

Where Amodei waves the unemployment flag, Bezos sees the opposite: a "labor shortage." Productivity will climb so high, he says, that living standards will follow, and some dual-income households will be able to get by on a single salary. Nicely put, for a man whose company, Amazon, laid off tens of thousands of people last year while accelerating its own automation.

Still, markets don't bet on a philosophy. When Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and BlackRock sign a check like that for a one-year-old company with no product, they're betting on a simple thesis: the physical world raises barriers that code alone can't clear. The AI frontier is leaving the screen for the workshop. Bezos just picked the most reassuring word to describe what looks, from the ground, like a tidal wave.

Alex.

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