Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has launched a new AI company and will be its co-CEO.

Project Prometheus has already raised $6.2 billion, including from Bezos, and plans to develop AI tools to speed up engineering and manufacturing across several fields, with The New York Times noting computers, aerospace, and automobiles as potential areas.

Bezos' return to the CEO seat is the first time he has held a formal operational role at a company since he left his position helming Amazon in 2021.

Project Prometheus is co-led by Vik Bajaj, who worked at 'moonshot factory' Google X and co-founded Alphabet's life sciences business Verily. He also co-founded AI and data science incubator Foresite Labs.

Project Prometheus has hired nearly 100 employees and has poached researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, and Meta, the NYT reports.

The exact aim of the business has yet to be disclosed, but it appears to be similar to Periodic Labs, which aims to build AI systems that can learn from the physical world. This can be used for robotics or to allow AI systems to run scientific experiments at scale.

Bezos remains deeply involved in his rocket business, Blue Origin, which last week successfully landed its New Glenn rocket.

Rival Elon Musk, who owns rocket company SpaceX and AI business xAI, labelled Prometheus a 'copycat.'