With a new company, Jeff Bezos will become a CEO again (arstechnica.com)

Jeff Bezos is reappearing as a CEO: he’ll serve as co‑CEO of a new venture called Project Prometheus, a startup focused on applying AI to breakthroughs in the “physical economy” — research, engineering, manufacturing and other hardware‑oriented domains — according to a New York Times report. His co‑CEO is Dr. Vik Bajaj, a chemist‑physicist who led life‑sciences efforts at Google X and has experience at Verily and Foresite Labs, signaling the company intends to bridge advanced AI with materials, biotech and complex engineering problems rather than just software products. For the AI/ML community this matters because it marks a major, well‑funded push to integrate ML with real‑world systems: automated discovery, robotics, materials design, scaled manufacturing and engineered systems. Bajaj’s background suggests emphasis on lab automation, simulation, and life‑science applications, while Bezos brings capital, logistics and product scaling expertise. If successful, Project Prometheus could accelerate investments in physical‑AI stacks (simulation environments, differentiable physics, automated experimentation, closed‑loop lab systems) and intensify competition for talent and compute. Details remain sparse, but the move underscores a broader trend: AI firms shifting from pure models to end‑to‑end systems that couple ML with hardware and production — a technically harder but potentially higher‑impact frontier.