Jeff Bezos is officially entering the artificial intelligence (AI) race as co-CEO of a new AI start-up called Project Prometheus, according to a report in the New York Times.
The company has already secured $6.2 billion (€5.3 billion) in funding, partly from Bezos, according to three anonymous sources close to the project. This would make it one of the most well-financed early-stage start-ups in the world.
If confirmed, it would mark Bezos’ first operational role in a company since stepping down as chief executive of Amazon in 2021.
The billionaire founder of Amazon and Blue Origin has already shown interest in AI. Last year, he invested in Physical Intelligence, a start-up using AI to power robots.
Elon Musk, who founded his own AI firm xAI, responded to the news by calling his rival a “copycat” in a post on his social media platform X.
Not much public information is available about Project Prometheus so far, including where the company will be based. The start-up’s LinkedIn page is mostly blank, listing 51-200 employees and the tagline “AI for the physical economy”.
The start-up has already hired nearly 100 employees, according to the New York Times report, including researchers from top AI companies such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta.
The three sources who spoke to the paper added that Project Prometheus will focus on applying AI to physical tasks, including robotics, drug design, and scientific discovery – in the vein of companies such as California-based Periodic Labs.
Instead of analysing data as large language models (LLMs) do, these companies want to build AI systems that can learn from the physical world through trial and error.
Bezos’ co-founder and co-CEO at Project Prometheus is Vik Bajaj, who updated his LinkedIn profile with both titles. He listed the job as being in San Francisco, London, and Zurich.
The physicist and chemist previously worked with Google’s X research team, producing services like Wing drone delivery and Waymo autonomous vehicles. He is also one of the founders of Foresite Labs, an incubator for AI and data science start-ups.
