New Delhi, Nov. 18 -- Jeff Bezos has taken an operational step back into the startup world. He is reportedly joining Project Prometheus as co-CEO, a new AI venture that is starting life with roughly $6.2 billion in capital. Unlike the large language model race focused on text and chat, Prometheus aims squarely at what the team calls "AI for the physical economy". These are systems that learn from real-world experiments and then apply that learning to robotics, lab automation, drug discovery and manufacturing.

Project Prometheus signals a shift in where founders and capital are placing their bets. The startup is positioning itself to build models that do not just predict text but interact with and learn from the physical world. That means...