According to The New York Times, the former world’s richest man has founded a new company and serves as its co-CEO.

With substantial financial backing, including an investment from Bezos himself, the company has secured $6.2 billion in funding.

This marks the first time Bezos has assumed a formal operational role since stepping down as CEO of Amazon.

Bezos Dives into Physical AI

Last year, Bezos invested in Physical Intelligence, a top AI robotics company founded by embodied AI expert Sergey Levine. Now, he has personally stepped in to establish Project Prometheus, venturing into the field of physical AI.

With Bezos’s involvement, the newly founded company has a strong financial foundation, having raised $6.2 billion, equivalent to approximately 44 billion yuan.

It already boasts a workforce of over a hundred employees, including researchers poached from top AI companies such as OpenAI and DeepMind.

Project Prometheus’s research projects involve applying artificial intelligence to physical tasks like robotics, drug design, and scientific discovery, with a clear focus on high-tech sectors such as computing, automotive, and aerospace.

The company’s technological focus aligns with Bezos’s interest in sending humans into outer space, as he has previously been deeply involved in Blue Origin, a rival to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

In terms of technological direction, Project Prometheus aims to develop AI models that learn in more complex ways than existing mainstream chatbots like ChatGPT, enabling them to learn from the physical world.

Bezos’s co-founder and fellow co-CEO for this venture is Vik Bajaj, a physicist and chemist who is also an adjunct professor at Stanford School of Medicine.