Jeff Bezos will be co-chief of this AI company

Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, is stepping back into hands-on leadership by becoming co-chief executive of an AI startup, Project Prometheus, the New York Times reported yesterday.

The company is launching with $6.2 billion in funding, partly from Bezos, making it one of the most heavily financed early-stage AI companies worldwide. This is Bezos’s first operational role since leaving Amazon in 2021, though he remains active at Blue Origin.

What is the company building?
Project Prometheus aims to develop advanced AI systems that improve engineering and manufacturing across aerospace, computing and the automotive industry.

The company aims to build world models that learn not just from digital text but from the physical world.

World models can understand scientific processes, predict outcomes and help design or test complex systems, making them central to the next wave of AI breakthroughs.

The company has quietly hired nearly 100 top researchers, many from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta. Its work aligns with Bezos’s long-term ambition to expand human activity into outer space.

Bezos is partnering with Vik Bajaj, a physicist who helped lead major innovation efforts at Google X, Verily and Foresite Labs.

With deep funding and elite talent, Project Prometheus enters a crowded AI race dominated by Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic, all of which are pushing for scientific and industrial breakthroughs.