Meir Valman
Jerusalem Post, July 29, 2024
“The field of AI faces a considerable shortage of top talent, and companies often need to bring in leading experts from academia to access the best minds.”
Given the current hype surrounding ChatGPT and other generative artificial intelligence programs, one might have thought that AI was a very new technology with a very short history.
However, it has taken many years of research and development to get to this stage, and Israelis – and Jews generally– have played an important role in this story.
Who are some of the Israeli and Jewish pioneers and innovators in artificial intelligence?
Mobileye, founded in 1999, stands out as Israel’s largest company in terms of market capitalization, with a value more than double that of the next largest. The company owes its success to its pioneering research in the AI technology of computer vision. At the time of the company’s inception, Israel had limited AI companies and expertise in the field, and there was little support for AI in universities and the commercial sector. As a result, many of the leading Israeli AI experts of today pursued their studies or gained experience abroad before returning home.
Prof. Amnon Shashua, the founder of Mobileye, is widely regarded as the father of AI in Israel. After completing his PhD and postdoctoral training at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, he returned to Israel in 1996, when the field was still in its infancy here. Mobileye’s emergence marked a breakthrough in the industry, as it was one of the first companies to successfully scale the emerging AI field of computer vision.