xAI’s Founding Exodus: Co-Founder Kyle Kosic Moves to Bezos’s Project Prometheus
Kyle Kosic did not stay long at either place.
Kosic co-founded xAI with Elon Musk in 2023, left when the first wave of departures began in 2024, joined OpenAI as technical staff, and now is leaving again. This time, he is joining Project Prometheus, Jeff Bezos's secretive AI startup focused on physical-world applications. The Financial Times confirmed the move; The Verge, Observer, and Silicon Republic all corroborated.
The departure is the latest data point in what has become a visible pattern: the xAI founding team is dispersing. xAI launched with twelve co-founders. Kosic was among the first to leave, in April 2024, and by late March all eleven of his co-founders had reportedly exited as well, leaving Musk as the sole founding member remaining. For a lab that launched with considerable fanfare and even more considerable resources, watching the founding bench hollow out in under three years is not a good sign.
The talent pipeline that keeps feeding Prometheus
What makes Kosic notable is not the move itself, but the route. xAI to OpenAI to Prometheus is a complete circuit of the current AI talent economy. He built Colossus, xAI's Memphis supercomputer, from the ground up. At OpenAI he worked on infrastructure. At Prometheus he will do the same, but with a different mandate.
Project Prometheus is not building another foundation model. It is building AI for the physical economy: manufacturing, aerospace, semiconductors, automobiles. The pitch is that AI can improve engineering and production in sectors where language models have done nothing. That is a crowded bet. AMI Labs, led by Yann LeCun, raised Europe's largest-ever seed round at $1 billion in March. World Labs, led by Fei-Fei Li, raised $1 billion in February. Both are in physical AI.
Prometheus has raised $6.2 billion already and is seeking another $6 billion. Bezos and co-founder Vikram Bajaj are also discussing a separate $100 billion fund to acquire companies in target sectors, according to the FT. Bajaj, a former Google X researcher, co-founded Verily and Foresite Capital. The connections to life sciences and investment give Prometheus a different texture than a typical AI lab.
Kosic is not Prometheus's only DeepMind, OpenAI, or Anthropic alumnus. The company has hired from all three. It acquired General Agents, an agentic AI startup, last year, bringing in Sherjil Ozair and William Guss, both veterans of DeepMind, Tesla, and OpenAI. The LinkedIn page lists between 51 and 200 employees, with offices in San Francisco, London, and Zurich.
The infrastructure problem is the same everywhere
Kosic's specific skill is telling. Colossus went from announcement to full cluster in months, which required solving power delivery, cooling, and networking at a scale most companies never attempt. That is exactly the kind of problem Prometheus faces if it is going to run AI workloads in manufacturing environments that are nothing like hyperscale data centers.
The global venture investment numbers for physical AI confirm the space is hot. $26.7 billion in the first two months of 2026 alone, per Crunchbase data reported by the WSJ, with projections reaching $33.5 billion by year end. That is nearly double the 2025 total. But the money is flowing into a class of problems that the existing AI stack was not designed to solve: unreliable connectivity, industrial safety requirements, real-time constraints, physical world interaction.
Kosic's job at Prometheus will be infrastructure. The same job he had at xAI. The same job he had at OpenAI. The difference is what is being built on top of it.
Sources: