WASHINGTON, United States (AFP) — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is returning to an operational leadership role for the first time in four years, taking the helm of a new AI venture with $6.2 billion in funding, a report said Monday.

According to the New York Times, citing sources familiar with the matter, the company, dubbed Project Prometheus, will focus on applying AI to engineering and manufacturing in sectors including computers, aerospace and automobiles.

Bezos will serve as co-chief executive alongside Vik Bajaj, a prominent Silicon Valley researcher who previously worked with Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the tech giant’s experimental X lab and co-founded life sciences research unit Verily.

The role at the startup represents Bezos’s first formal executive position since stepping down as Amazon CEO in July 2021.

The billionaire has since devoted time to his aerospace company, Blue Origin, and made headlines for his personal life, including a star-studded wedding in Venice this year.

Bezos has also more closely aligned himself with the Trump administration, attending the president’s inauguration in January and ordering a pro-business revamp of the opinion page at the Washington Post, the news media outlet he owns.

Project Prometheus enters a crowded AI market dominated by tech giants Google, Meta and Microsoft, alongside pioneering firms OpenAI and Anthropic. The company has already assembled nearly 100 employees, including researchers recruited from top AI labs, the Times reported.

The venture is part of a broader trend toward applying AI to physical tasks, often using robotics.

Unlike the generative AI technology behind ChatGPT, it aims to develop systems that learn from real-world experimentation, rather than just digital text, with the goal of accelerating scientific discovery in physics, chemistry and engineering.