The two world's richest men have had an argument. Jeff Bezos is raising $44.7 billion to make a comeback in the AI field. Elon Musk says: "Copycat."

It was supposed to be a glorious moment for Jeff Bezos, the former world's richest man, but it was disrupted by a cat emoji.

Early this morning, as the news that Bezos was going to personally enter the AI company field started to spread online, Elon Musk quickly retweeted the post and added a line:

Haha, no way. Copy cat.

If you follow the tech circle, you're probably used to this kind of scenario.

From satellites to rockets, these two tech giants have been arguing with each other for a full twenty years. Now, the battlefield of their quarrels has shifted to the hottest field at present: physical AI.

With $6.2 billion, Bezos kicks off the most lavish startup in history

In 2021, Bezos handed over the position of Amazon CEO to Andy Jassy. We thought he was going to focus on being a wealthy man and enjoy life. But four years later, the king of e - commerce suddenly announced: I'm going back to the front line.

This time, the new project he's targeting is called Project Prometheus.

According to The New York Times, this project started with a financing of $6.2 billion (equivalent to 44.7 billion RMB), and a significant portion of it came out of Bezos' own pocket.

With this huge sum of money, Project Prometheus has launched a "talent scramble" in Silicon Valley and has poached nearly 100 top researchers who previously worked at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta.

So what exactly does Project Prometheus, which made Bezos choose to start a second business, aim to do?

Simply put, it's to bring AI from the virtual world into the real world. Currently, most of the AI on the market generates content by learning from text and images on the Internet. They're good at writing articles, drawing pictures, and chatting, but they have a fatal flaw: they don't understand the physical world.

For example, if you ask ChatGPT "how to design a lighter aircraft wing", it might give you a lot of theories, but it has never touched a real wing and doesn't know how different materials perform in a wind tunnel.

What Bezos wants to do is to make AI actually conduct experiments.

It is reported that Project Prometheus is building an ultra - large automated laboratory in Northern California. In this laboratory, robots will conduct physical, chemical, and engineering tests 24 hours a day. AI will, like scientists, propose hypotheses, design experiments, observe results, draw conclusions, and then continuously iterate and optimize.

The target fields are very clear: aerospace, automotive engineering, and computer hardware manufacturing. For example, in the aerospace field, AI can run thousands of wind tunnel simulations on its own to find the optimal wing shape; in automobile manufacturing, AI can plan how the robots on the entire production line should cooperate.

In addition, the partner Bezos chose is also very interesting: Vik Bajaj.

He is a cross - disciplinary scientist with an academic background in physics and chemistry. He was a core member of the mysterious Google X laboratory and participated in the early development of the drone delivery project Wing and the self - driving project Waymo. Later, he founded Verily, a life - science company under Alphabet.

Choosing such a person as the co - CEO means having a helmsman to steer the course at least on the technical level.

Why did Musk say Bezos was "copying"?

Musk's tweet of "Copycat" this time is not without reason.

In recent years, Musk has been emphasizing that Tesla has become an AI and robotics company. Now that Bezos also wants to get into physical AI and has invested in a number of robotics companies, in Musk's view, Bezos' entry into the physical AI and robotics fields is more like copying Tesla's playbook.

The feud between the two has a long history.

In 2019, when Amazon announced the Project Kuiper satellite project, Musk immediately called Bezos a "Copycat" because SpaceX's Starlink had been in planning since 2015.

In the same year, when Bezos unveiled the "Blue Moon" lunar lander, Musk made a spoof photo and changed "Blue Moon" to "Blue Balls". In 2020, when Amazon acquired the self - driving company Zoox for $1.2 billion, Musk tweeted again: "@JeffBezos is a copycat".

Looking back further, the bad blood between them started even earlier.

When they first met in 2004, the meeting ended badly. In 2013, they had a fierce fight over NASA's Launch Complex 39A. In 2014, they had a patent lawsuit, and in 2021, they went to court over a lunar landing contract.

However, despite their twenty - year feud, Musk still showed some grace in the face of technological achievements.

On November 13th local time, New Glenn, a heavy - lift rocket of Bezos' Blue Origin, was successfully launched, and its first - stage booster was perfectly recovered. Later, Musk sent his congratulations on X.

Both Bezos' Project Prometheus and Musk's Tesla and Optimus are working on the same thing: making AI truly understand the physical world and be able to step out of the screen.

So, putting aside the "copying" squabble, what's more worth paying attention to is that when two top players are both betting on physical AI, the explosion of this field may come faster than we think.

This article is from the WeChat official account "APPSO". Author: APPSO, the discoverer of tomorrow's products. It is published by 36Kr with authorization.