Jeff Bezos reportedly returns to the trenches as co-CEO of new AI startup, Project Prometheus (techcrunch.com)

Jeff Bezos is reportedly returning to an operational role as co-CEO of a newly funded AI startup called Project Prometheus, which has raised about $6.2 billion, according to the New York Times. He’ll share leadership with Vik Bajaj, a longtime Google life‑sciences and Verily executive who recently left Foresite Labs to start Prometheus. The company — already nearly 100 people strong with researchers from Meta, OpenAI and DeepMind — is positioning itself to build AI products for the “physical economy,” targeting engineering and manufacturing domains like computers, aerospace and automobiles. Technically, Project Prometheus appears to focus on simulation‑driven ML: creating detailed virtual models of physical systems to train and validate AI that can accelerate design, testing and manufacturing (similar in intent to Periodic Labs’ approach). That emphasis could speed scientific research, generative design, and simulation-to-real deployment of robot and control systems, while increasing demand for large‑scale physics simulators, specialized data pipelines, and verification/safety tooling. For the AI/ML community this signals major capital and talent flow into industrial and embodied AI — promising rapid advances in applied simulation, but also raising questions about robustness, real‑world safety, and the regulatory and workforce impacts of automating complex physical tasks.