Project Prometheus: Jeff Bezos becomes co-CEO of $6.2 billion AI startup

Jeff Bezos reportedly has a new project in the works. The Amazon founder is to become co-chief executive (co-CEO) of a new, hitherto secret AI start-up, as reported by the New York Times, citing three anonymous sources. The name of the company is Project Prometheus, which is said to have already raised $6.2 billion in capital, some of it directly from Bezos himself.

If true, this would make Project Prometheus one of the best-funded early-stage start-ups in the world. Bezos' new partner and co-CEO at Project Prometheus is Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist. Bajaj is no stranger to the scene, having led AI projects at Google's "Moonshot" development division X and co-founded the Alphabet research lab Verily in 2015. Most recently, Bajaj served as CEO of Foresite Labs, an incubator for new startups in the fields of AI and data science.

Project Prometheus is entering an extremely crowded AI market, but with a specific focus. The company does not intend to create pure text chatbots (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Anthropic. Instead, Project Prometheus' AI will learn from the physical world, with the goal of developiing AI for complex tasks in engineering and manufacturing. The New York Times specifically mentions the fields of computers, automotive engineering and aerospace. This clearly overlaps with Bezos' other passion, namely his space company Blue Origin.

For Bezos, this is a logical step. Last year, the Amazon founder invested in start-up Physical Intelligence, which also applies AI to robots. While LLMs analyze patterns in text, the Prometheus systems (similar to the start-up Periodic Labs) are designed to learn through physical trial and error, such as through robot experiments. To achieve this expensive goal, Project Prometheus has already hired nearly 100 employees, including top researchers poached from DeepMind, Meta and OpenAI.