https://www.theverge.com/2018/6/5/17431012/amazon-grand-challenge-moonshot-lab-google-glass-creator-babak-parviz

Amazon has spun up a secret lab within its Seattle headquarters called Grand Challenge that the company has set to work on ideas as bold as curing cancer, according to a new report from CNBC. Grand Challenge is run by former Google employee and Google Glass creator Babak Parviz, and it’s designed much like the original Google X moonshots lab, now a subsidiary of Alphabet and known simply as X.

Parviz and his team were part of a larger organization at Google that worked on wearable computing as well as the self-driving car unit now known as Waymo and the artificial intelligence division that became Google Brain. Amazon has its sights set on similarly bold technologies. According to the report, Grand Challenge is also known internally as 1492 and Amazon X, signifying that the group is focused on radical ideas that could revolutionize industries. Since its creation in 2014, it has added more than 50 people, CNBC reports.