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.

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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