Jeff Bezos is returning to a formal leadership role for the first time since leaving Amazon, taking the helm of a heavily funded artificial intelligence startup focused on revolutionizing manufacturing and engineering. The billionaire will serve as co-chief executive of Project Prometheus, a new AI company that has secured $6.2 billion in funding, partly from Bezos himself, according to The New York Times. This marks Bezos’s first operational role since stepping down as Amazon CEO in July 2021.

Bezos’ AI startup targets aerospace and automotive manufacturing

Project Prometheus is focusing on AI that will help in engineering and manufacturing across multiple sectors, including computers, aerospace and automobiles. The company’s mission aligns with Bezos’s longstanding interest in space exploration through Blue Origin, his rocket company that recently achieved a successful booster landing.Bezos’s co-founder and co-CEO is Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who previously worked closely with Google co-founder Sergey Brin at Google X, the tech giant’s experimental research division known as “The Moonshot Factory”. The Times reports that Bajaj also co-founded health tech venture Verily and later led Foresite Labs before joining Project Prometheus.

Top talent from OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta join Project Prometheus

The startup has already assembled nearly 100 employees, including researchers recruited from leading AI companies such as OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta, according to sources familiar with the company.Project Prometheus is among a wave of companies focused on applying AI to physical tasks, including robotics, drug design and scientific discovery. The company plans to build AI systems that learn from real-world physical experimentation rather than just analyzing digital text, potentially giving it an edge in practical manufacturing applications.The $6.2 billion funding makes Project Prometheus one of the most well-financed early-stage startups globally, surpassing the $2 billion raised by Thinking Machines Lab earlier this year.