US: Jeff Bezos, who left the top job at Amazon in 2021, is stepping back into a co-chief executive role with a new $6.2bn technology venture called Project Prometheus. This marks his first return to such a position in four years and signals a major push into advanced engineering tools.
Project Prometheus aims to build cutting-edge systems that speed up how industries design and manufacture products. The company is developing technology for sectors such as aerospace, automobiles, and computing. Instead of relying only on digital information, its models are being trained to learn from complex physical experiments, allowing them to tackle real engineering challenges.
Bezos will head the company alongside Vik Bajaj, a well-known Silicon Valley scientist who previously worked with Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the tech giant’s X research lab. Bajaj also helped set up Verily, a life sciences unit focused on scientific innovation.
The new venture has already hired more than 100 specialists, including researchers from Meta, OpenAI, and Google DeepMind. Their goal is to build tools that can support robotics, scientific discovery, and high-precision industrial work.
The approach also ties into Bezos’ long-term vision of advancing space exploration by developing systems that can make off-planet labour more practical and cost-effective.
Project Prometheus arrives at a time when the global tech industry is locked in an intense race to develop the next generation of intelligent technologies. Since the rapid rise of ChatGPT in late 2022, companies like Microsoft, Google, and Meta have redirected massive resources toward this field. But while many focus on text-based systems, Bezos’ new venture is working on technologies shaped by real-world experiments, with the aim of boosting breakthroughs in physics, chemistry, and engineering.
