Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is to be the co-CEO of a new artificial intelligence startup Project Prometheus, along with Vik Bajaj. Bajaj is a former director of GoogleX, the so-called “Moonshot Factory,” where he worked closely with Google co-founder Sergey Brin on efforts including the self-driving car that became Waymo. Bezos will be returning to operations for the first time after he stepped away from Amazon in 2021.
According to the New York Times, the startup is going to build AI products for engineering and manufacturing in various fields like computers, aerospace, and automobiles. Project Prometheus — which is still in stealth mode — is focused on “AI for the physical economy,” per its LinkedIn page. The NYT report also noted its work will resemble that of Periodic Labs, which is building technology to speed up scientific research by simulating the physical world to train AI models.
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Elon Musk, founder of xAI responded to this by writing “Haha no way,” in an X post. He added the words “copy” and an emoji depicting a cat.
This isn’t the first time Musk called Bezos a copycat. He had done so previously when Amazon announced plans to launch internet-beaming satellites in competition with Musk’s SpaceX, and again when Amazon acquired self-driving car company Zoox to take on Musk’s Tesla.
Bezos is also founder of space technology company Blue Origin, which will be working with Project Prometheus to further Bezos’s space ambitions.
Bezos spoke at Italian Tech Week 2025, saying “In the next kind of couple of decades, I believe there will be millions of people living in space … That’s how fast this is going to accelerate,” emphasizing that advanced robotics and AI will enable not just off-planet living, but also new forms of labor and creativity. “If you need to do some work on the surface of the moon or anywhere else, we will be able to send robots to do that work, and that will be much more cost-effective than sending humans,” he added.
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Bezos also spoke about the artificial intelligence bubble during the same tech week. He laid out some of the key characteristics of bubbles, noting that when they happen, stock prices are “disconnected from the fundamentals” of a business. “The second thing that happens is that people get very excited like they are today about artificial intelligence,” Bezos added, and told the audience that during bubbles, every idea or experiment gets funded.
“The good ideas and the bad ideas. And investors have a hard time in the middle of this excitement, distinguishing between the good ideas and the bad ideas. And that’s also probably happening today,” Bezos said. “But that doesn’t mean anything that is happening isn’t real. AI is real, and it is going to change every industry,” he added.