Would hate to have to clean up that mess.

Space Coast communities have spent years and millions of dollars restoring the Indian River Lagoon. Now, they hope to stop Blue Origin from reversing that progress.

The watermark is invisible to the naked eye. Here's how to find it.

This week on the GeekWire Podcast: Jeff Bezos is back in startup mode (sort of) with Project Prometheus — a $6.2 billion AI-for-the-physical-world venture that instantly became one of the most talked-about new companies in tech. We dig into what this really means, why the company’s location is still a mystery, and how this echoes the era when Bezos was regularly launching big bets from Seattle.

Then we look at Amazon’s latest real-world experiment: package-return kiosks popping up inside Goodwill stores around the Seattle region. It’s a small pilot, but it brings back memories of the early days when Amazon’s oddball experiments seemed to appear out of nowhere.

And finally…Todd tries to justify his scheme to upgrade his beloved 2007 Toyota Camry with CarPlay, Android Auto, and a backup camera — while John questions the logic of sinking thousands of dollars into an old car.

All that, plus a mystery Microsoft shirt, a little Seattle nostalgia, and a look ahead to next week’s podcast collaboration with Me, Myself and AI from MIT Sloan Management Review.

With GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop.

Subscribe to GeekWire in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

There’s been a lot of talk of an AI bubble lately, especially regarding circular funding involving companies like OpenAI and Anthropic—but Clem Delangue, CEO of machine-learning resources hub Hugging Face, has made the case that the bubble is specific to large language models, which is just one application of AI.

“I think we’re in an LLM bubble, and I think the LLM bubble might be bursting next year,” he said at an Axios event this week, as quoted in a TechCrunch article. “But ‘LLM’ is just a subset of AI when it comes to applying AI to biology, chemistry, image, audio, [and] video. I think we’re at the beginning of it, and we’ll see much more in the next few years.”

At Ars, we’ve written at length in recent days about the fears around AI investment. But to Delangue’s point, almost all of those discussions are about companies whose chief product is large language models, or the data centers meant to drive those—specifically, those focused on general-purpose chatbots that are meant to be everything for everybody.

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Jeff Bezos is one of the world’s richest and most famous tech CEOs, but he hasn’t actually been a CEO of anything since 2021. That’s now changing as he takes on the role of co-CEO of a new AI company, according to a New York Times report citing three people familiar with the company.

Grandiosely named Project Prometheus (and not to be confused with the NASA project of the same name), the company will focus on using AI to pursue breakthroughs in research, engineering, manufacturing, and other fields that are dubbed part of “the physical economy”—in contrast to the software applications that are likely the first thing most people in the general public think of when they hear “AI.”

Bezos’ co-CEO will be Vik Bajaj, a chemist and physicist who previously led life sciences work at Google X, an Alphabet-backed research group that worked on speculative projects that could lead to more product categories. (For example, it developed technologies that would later underpin Google’s Waymo service.) Bajaj also worked at Verily, another Alphabet-backed research group focused on life sciences, and Foresite Labs, an incubator for new AI companies.

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Jeff Bezos is a startup CEO again.

The Amazon founder is co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a new AI startup that has raised $6.2 billion in funding, according to The New York Times, making it one of the most well-funded early stage AI companies.

The move represents Bezos’ return to an operational executive role for the first time since stepping down as CEO of Amazon in 2021. He is “founder” at Blue Origin, his Kent, Wash.-based space company, but the role at Project Prometheus reflects his desire to engage more directly.

There are few public details about the company. Its LinkedIn page offers a simple description: “AI for the physical economy.” Bezos is also an investor in the company.

The startup already has about 100 employees and is targeting computers, automobiles, and aerospace, according to the Times. Its headquarters location is unknown.

Bezos will lead the company with fellow co-CEO and co-founder Vik Bajaj, a life sciences veteran who previously worked on research efforts at Alphabet’s “moonshot” unit Google X. Bajaj is managing director at Foresite Capital Management and also co-founder and a director at Xaira Therapeutics, a biotech startup with offices in Seattle.

Given Bezos’ existing ties to Amazon (as founder and largest individual shareholder), there could be potential collaboration between the Seattle tech giant and Project Prometheus.

For example, Amazon could serve as a potential customer, R&D partner, or infrastructure provider for Prometheus’s AI-for-engineering ambitions. The startup could also benefit from Amazon’s existing logistics, robotics and operational systems experience.

During a recent fireside chat at Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin, Bezos acknowledged signs of an AI “industrial bubble” — but also said the technology will bring massive benefits to society.

“When the dust settles and you see who are the winners, society benefits from those inventions. … The benefits to society from AI are going to be gigantic,” he said.

What’s it like to pitch your dream on Shark Tank, get rejected on national TV in front of 8 million people — and then turn that failure into a company Amazon later buys for more than $1 billion? Ring founder Jamie Siminoff did just that.

A serial inventor and entrepreneur, Siminoff joins us on this episode of the GeekWire Podcast to talk about his new book, Ding Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone’s Front Door (out Nov. 10), sharing the messy, high-stakes, and ultimately inspiring story behind the company.

Now back at Amazon as a vice president leading Ring and the company’s home-security businesses, Siminoff reflects on failure, reinvention, and what comes next in the age of AI.

Listen below, subscribe on Apple or Spotify, and keep reading for highlights.

What he learned writing the book: The book was almost therapeutic — just going back and looking at this stuff. … My best traits, my most powerful traits, the things that make me successful, are also the worst ones.

The importance of having a bigger mission: At Ring, if we had failed, I could still sit here today and say “We tried to make neighborhoods safer.” At least we were successful at trying something. And so that’s where I think mission is just so powerful.

Establishing a company culture with a strong point of view: A real culture is something that not everyone feels matches them … Two things can coexist at the same time: You can have a ton of empathy and care about people and also be a hard-charger.

The inventor’s mindset: Invention is not just product. Invention’s everything. It’s the process. And I think you can invent everywhere. … If you boil down what an inventor is, anything I see that’s broken, I’m fixing it. I can’t help myself.

Returning to Amazon: The thing that you get from leaving and coming back is the clarity of everything. I got to really see clearly everything we did, what we did wrong, what we did right. And so coming back, I feel like I have a newfound clarity for the business.

The impact of AI: What’s crazy now is with AI, all those timelines are collapsing on themselves. In the next 12 months, I can’t even imagine what we’re going to be able to accomplish. … AI understands more like a human, [which] allows you to do things that are just completely different and more efficient.

Related links and stories

• Pre-order the book on Amazon.
• GeekWire: Ring founder Jamie Siminoff rejoins Amazon in new VP role
• Business Insider: Amazon VP says his division is hiring and promoting based on employees’ AI usage
• Inc.: The tech founder who wants to fix small-town America

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company’s latest big round of layoffs — about 14,000 corporate jobs — wasn’t triggered by financial strain or artificial intelligence replacing workers, but rather a push to stay nimble.

Speaking with analysts on Amazon’s quarterly earnings call Thursday, Jassy said the decision stemmed from a belief that the company had grown too big and too layered.

“The announcement that we made a few days ago was not really financially driven, and it’s not even really AI-driven — not right now, at least,” he said. “Really, it’s culture.”

Jassy’s comments are his first public explanation of the layoffs, which reportedly could ultimately total as many as 30,000 people — and would be the largest workforce reduction in Amazon’s history.

The news this week prompted speculation that the cuts were tied to automation or AI-related restructuring. Earlier this year, Jassy wrote in a memo to employees that he expected Amazon’s total corporate workforce to shrink over time due to efficiency gains from AI.

But his comments Thursday framed the layoffs as a cultural reset aimed at keeping the company fast-moving amid what he called “the technology transformation happening right now.”

Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos as CEO in mid-2021, has pushed to reduce management layers and eliminate bureaucracy inside the company. Amazon’s corporate headcount tripled between 2017 and 2022, according to The Information, before the company adopted a more cautious hiring approach.

Bloomberg News reported this week that Jassy has told colleagues parts of the company remain “unwieldy” despite efforts to streamline operations — including significant layoffs in 2023 when Amazon cut 27,000 corporate workers in multiple stages. 

On Thursday’s call, Jassy said Amazon’s rapid growth led to extra layers of management that slowed decision-making.

“When that happens, sometimes without realizing it, you can weaken the ownership of the people that you have who are doing the actual work and who own most of the two-way door decisions — the ones that should be made quickly and right at the front line,” Jassy said, using a phrase popularized by Bezos to help determine how much thought and planning to put into big and small decisions.

The layoffs, he said, are meant to restore the kind of ownership and agility that defined Amazon’s early years.

“We are committed to operating like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy said, repeating a line he’s used recently.

Given the “transformation” he described happening across the business world, Jassy said it’s more important than ever to be lean, flat, and fast-moving. “That’s what we’re going to do,” he said.

Jassy’s comments came as Amazon reported quarterly revenue of $180.2 billion, up 13% year-over-year, with AWS revenue growth accelerating to 20% — its fastest pace since 2022.

Amazon said it took a $1.8 billion severance-related charge in the quarter related to the layoffs.

Amazon joins other tech giants including Microsoft that have trimmed headcount this year while investing heavily in AI infrastructure.

Related coverage:

• Amazon layoffs hit software engineers hardest in Washington
• Amazon stock soars 11% after topping Q3 estimates with $180B in revenue, $21B in profits