Source: Sharecast
The venture, as reported by the New York Times, was launching with $6.2bn in funding, partly from Mr Bezos, making it one of the world’s best-capitalised early-stage AI companies.
According to the Times, Project Prometheus was developing AI systems to advance engineering and manufacturing across sectors including computing, aerospace and automotive technology, aligning with Mr Bezos’s long-standing interest in space through Blue Origin.
The company has been operating with unusual secrecy and has not disclosed where it will be based.
It said the start-up was co-led by Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who previously worked at Google X alongside Sergey Brin before helping to found Verily and later Foresite Labs.
Dr Bajaj left his role at Foresite to focus fully on the new venture, the Times reported.
Project Prometheus was entering an increasingly crowded AI field dominated by Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic, while a wave of smaller firms was racing to apply AI to physical sciences, robotics and industrial design.
The Times noted that several researchers had recently departed major AI labs to join such efforts, including the newly formed Periodic Labs.
With nearly 100 employees already hired - many reportedly from OpenAI, DeepMind and Meta - Project Prometheus was aiming to build AI models that learn not only from digital text, like large language models, but also from physical experimentation.
Such an approach mirrors work at companies such as Periodic Labs, which was constructing a robotics-driven research facility to generate experimental data at scale.
Reporting by Josh White for Sharecast.com.