Jeff Bezos will be co-CEO of AI startup Project Prometheus

Jeff Bezos is getting a new job. He’ll reportedly become co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a new startup that he’s partly funding. The company’s exact plans are still unknown, but its focus is on AI that could improve manufacturing in fields including computing, automobiles, and aerospace.

The New York Times reports that Project Prometheus is already one of the better funded early-stage start-ups in the world, with $6.2 billion in investment, in part from Bezos himself. In addition to financing the venture, he’ll help run the company together with co-founder Vik Bajaj. He’s a physicist and chemist who once worked at Google X, the company’s experimental “moonshot factory,” before running health tech company Verily, an Alphabet-owned venture spun out of that division.

Project Prometheus reportedly has nearly 100 employees already, including former staff from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta. With Bezos now among them, this will be his first formal operational role at a company since he stepped down as Amazon CEO in 2021, though since then he’s taken a keen interest in his SpaceX rival Blue Origin, which last week completed the first successful landing of its New Glenn booster.