Project Prometheus
AI for Engineering from Jeff Bezos
Project Prometheus is a new AI venture that aims to develop advanced AI tools for engineering and manufacturing, backed by $6.2 billion in funding courtesy of Amazon's Jeff Bezos. The project aims to create AI technologies that learn from real-world processes rather than just digital data. This initiative targets several key industries including aerospace, automobiles, and advanced manufacturing. The project seeks to enhance engineering and manufacturing processes, potentially transforming how physical products are designed and built.
Jeff Bezos serves as co-CEO alongside Vik Bajaj, a prominent researcher with experience at Google X and Verily. Bajaj's background in physics and chemistry supports the technical direction of the startup. The team comprises nearly 100 employees, including top talent from leading AI firms such as OpenAI, Meta, and Google DeepMind, indicating a strong foundation in AI research and development.
Project Prometheus has launched with a substantial $6.2 billion in funding, making it one of the most heavily backed early-stage AI startups. This financial backing includes contributions from Bezos himself, highlighting his commitment to advancing AI technology. The project is positioned within a competitive landscape where major players like Google, Microsoft, and Meta are also investing heavily in AI research and applications.
Bezos's return to an operational role through Project Prometheus signifies his belief in the enormous potential of AI in industry. The project aligns with broader trends in technology, where AI is increasingly seen as a driver of innovation in manufacturing and engineering. Project Prometheus represents a significant step in the application of AI to real-world challenges, with the potential to reshape industries and enhance productivity through advanced technological solutions.
The Backstory
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the world's wealthiest people, is throwing his money and time into an AI start-up that he will help manage as its co-chief executive. The company, Project Prometheus, is coming out of the gates with $6.2 billion in funding, partly from Mr. Bezos, making it one of the most well-financed early-stage start-ups in the world. This is the first time Mr. 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, Mr. Bezos has received as much attention for his personal life as his businesses, including an extravagant wedding in Venice 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.
The new company has until now kept a low profile. Project Prometheus is focusing on technology that dovetails with Mr. 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. It is unclear where Project Prometheus will be based.
Mr. 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, Dr. 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, Dr. 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.
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 Periodic Labs, a company that is focused on building AI technology that can accelerate discoveries in areas like physics and chemistry.
Last year, Mr. 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. Thinking Machines Lab, founded by a group of former OpenAI employees, raised $2 billion in funding this year.
Project Prometheus has already hired nearly 100 employees, including researchers poached from top AI companies such as OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta. 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 AlphaFold, a project that can help accelerate drug discovery in small but important ways. Executives at these companies and others in the field often say large language models 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.
Large language models learn their skills by analyzing enormous amounts of digital text. By pinpointing patterns in Wikipedia articles, news articles and other information culled from across the internet, these systems learn to mimic the way people put words together. They can even learn to write computer programs and solve math problems.
The new companies are focusing on systems that can also learn from the physical world. Periodic Labs, which has $300 million in backing, plans to build its own lab in Northern California where robots will run scientific experiments on an enormous scale. By analyzing this physical trial and error, AI systems can learn to perform experiments largely on their own. Project Prometheus will explore similar work, amply funded and led by one of the world's richest men.
Links
nytimes.com/2025/11/17/technology/bezos-project-prometheus
investopedia.com/jeff-bezos-is-a-ceo-again-here-s-what-his-new-usd6b-project-is-all-about-prometheus
newatlas.com/ai-humanoids/jeff-bezos-ai-manufacturing-startup-prometheus