Jeff Bezos to co-lead AI startup in first operational role since Amazon

By Cade Metz

 

Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the world’s wealthiest people, is throwing his money and time into an artificial intelligence start-up that he will help manage as its co-chief executive.

 

The company, called Project Prometheus, is coming out of the gates with $6.2 billion in funding, partly from Bezos, making it one of the most well-financed early-stage start-ups in the world, said three people familiar with the company who spoke on condition of anonymity because details have not yet been made public. 

This is the first time Bezos has taken a formal operational role in a company since he stepped down as chief executive of Amazon in July 2021. Though he is deeply involved in Blue Origin, a competitor to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, his official title at the space company is founder. 

Since leaving Amazon, Bezos has received as much attention for his personal life as his businesses, including an extravagant celebrity-filled wedding in Venice earlier this year. He has also become more closely involved in Blue Origin and has shown increasing interest in the race to build artificial intelligence. 

His new company now firmly plants him in the middle of that competition. Project Prometheus is entering an increasingly crowded AI market, with smaller companies trying to carve out niches in a race with industry giants like Google, Meta and Microsoft and pioneering companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. 

Project Prometheus is focusing on technology that dovetails with Bezos’ interest in taking people to outer space. The company is focusing on AI that will help in engineering and manufacturing in a number of fields, including computers, aerospace and automobiles. It is unclear where Project Prometheus will be based. 

Bezos’ co-founder and co-chief executive is Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who worked closely with Google’s co-founder Sergey Brin at Google’s X, a research effort often called “The Moonshot Factory.” Google X produced a wide range of ambitious projects, including Wing, a drone delivery service, and the self-driving car that became Waymo. 

In 2015, Bajaj was among the founders of Verily, a research lab dedicated to the life sciences that, like Waymo and Wing, is operated by Google’s parent company, Alphabet. 

Three years later, Bajaj co-founded and became chief executive of Foresite Labs, an effort to incubate new AI and data science start-ups. He recently left that job to focus on Project Prometheus, according to the three people who spoke on condition of anonymity. 

Project Prometheus is among a wave of companies focused on applying AI to physical tasks, including robotics, drug design and scientific discovery. This year several prominent researchers left Meta, OpenAI, Google DeepMind and other big AI projects to found a company called Periodic Labs, which is focused on building AI technology that can accelerate new discoveries in areas like physics and chemistry. Last year, Bezos invested in Physical Intelligence, a start-up that is applying AI to robots. 

But the $6.2 billion in funding behind Project Prometheus potentially gives it an advantage in the expensive race to build AI technologies. Earlier this year, Thinking Machines Lab, founded by a group of former OpenAI employees, raised $2 billion in funding. 

Project Prometheus has already hired nearly 100 employees, including researchers poached from top AI companies such as OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta, the three people said. 

A number of well-known AI companies — including OpenAI, Google and Meta — are already working on technologies meant to accelerate work in the physical sciences. Two researchers at Google DeepMind, the company’s primary AI lab, recently won a Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work on a project called AlphaFold, which can help accelerate drug discovery in small but important ways. 

Executives at these companies and others in the field often say that large language models — the technologies that power chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT — will soon achieve significant scientific breakthroughs. OpenAI and Meta say their technologies are already approaching this goal in areas like math and theoretical physics. 

But companies like Periodic Labs and now Project Prometheus aim to build AI models that learn in more complex ways than chatbots do.

 

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