Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and one of the world's richest people, has unexpectedly returned to his executive position as co-founder and co-e CEO of the Prometheus Project, an artificial intelligence startup that is receiving special attention from the technology world.
This is the first time since resigning as CEO of Amazon in 2021 that Bezos has taken on an official executive role in a new company.
The Prometheus project was launched with an initial capital of up to 6.2 billion USD, of which a significant part came from Bezos himself.
This huge investment immediately made Prometheus one of the most heavily supported early-stage startups in the world.
The company is still operating quite secretly, not revealing the time of establishment or headquarters location, but the core strategy has been somewhat exposed when it developed AI technology to serve physical and technical tasks, especially associated with Bezos's vision of space exploration.
Bezos's co-founder is Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who worked at Google X, which produced many bold projects such as wing or Waymo.
Bajaj then co-founded Verily and ran Foresite Labs before leaving to focus entirely on Prometheus.
The combination of Bezos, the creator of technology empire, and Bajaj, the scientist behind many strategic projects, makes experts assess Prometheus as a formidable opponent in the field of applied AI.
Prometheus is attracting nearly 100 elite employees, mostly from leading AI laboratories such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind and Meta.
This shows the ambition to compete directly with the giants leading the advanced AI race, where Big Tech and pioneering startups such as Anthropic or Periodic Labs are investing billions of dollars each year.
While major language models such as GPT or Llama continue to dominate the field of text-based AI, Prometheus aims for the next generation of models capable of learning from the physical world.
This trend is being pursued by many scientists because it promises to create breakthroughs in robots, drug design, physics, chemistry or automated production.
Bezos has recently shown a special interest in physical AI, by investing in companies such as Physical Intelligence.
However, Prometheus was the biggest and most daring move. With huge resources and a leading research team, the company is expected to create AI platforms capable of conducting scientific experiments on its own, optimizing technical processes and supporting large-scale production.
In the context of the heating up AI race, Bezos's direct return to the executive role shows that he wants to make a new mark in the technology industry, this time not e-commerce but physical-generation artificial intelligence, the field predicted to create the next industrial revolution.
