Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has been reported to join the mysterious AI startup Project Prometheus as co-CEO. The company completed a $6.2 billion (approximately 44.1 billion Chinese yuan) seed round of funding at its inception, making it one of the best-funded early-stage startups globally. Part of the funding came from Bezos personally, while the rest of the investors remain undisclosed; the company has no official website, has not publicly revealed its founding date or headquarters, and has currently recruited about 100 employees, with the core team coming from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Meta.
Project Prometheus focuses on "physical AI," developing artificial intelligence systems for computers, aerospace, automotive, and manufacturing industries, aiming to enhance the level of automation in complex engineering and manufacturing processes. Co-CEO Vik Bajaj previously served as a key member of Google X's moonshot factory, participated in the incubation of Waymo and Wing drone projects, and founded the life science laboratory Verily and the AI data science company Foresite Labs.
This time, Bezos is personally taking on an operational role, which is his first since stepping down as CEO of Amazon in 2021. Sources reveal that the company plans to build a large experimental facility, allowing AI to conduct "large-scale scientific experiments" through robots, thus autonomously learning skills related to the physical world, competing with other "AI for Science" approaches such as xAI and Periodic Labs. The market expects Project Prometheus to announce its first products in 2026 and may potentially implement demonstration applications in space manufacturing needs in conjunction with Blue Origin.
