Israel’s AI Startups Carry On As Employees Mobilize for War, Run to Shelters

In the face of sudden violence and tragedy, Israel’s AI startups exemplify unyielding resilience and determination, navigating through the challenges with profound unity and an unwavering spirit.

 

Copyright: venturebeat.com – “Israel’s AI Startups Carry On As Employees Mobilize for War, Run to Shelters”

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AI startups in Israel, which have provided some of the country’s biggest tech success stories, are trying to carry on with regular business operations after the violent surprise attack by Hamas left over 900 Israelis killed and hundreds kidnapped over the weekend. At the same time, they are working to support employees who are being called to the front lines of the newly-declared war with Gaza.

“Tough times. Gut-wrenching and blood-curdling stories. Our 9-11. But we’ll prevail,”  Yoav Shoham, co-founder of AI21 Labs, which competes with OpenAI in the LLM space, told VentureBeat by email. Shoham, who is also a professor emeritus at Stanford University, added that he is currently hosting a family in his home “who were in the eye of the storm.”

And Uri Eliabayev, an AI consultant and lecturer who is the founder of Machine & Deep Learning Israel, the country’s largest AI community, asked VentureBeat to edit his comments to sound appropriate in English because he wrote them “while running to the shelter.”

Many artificial intelligence researchers and data scientists, he said, are working on several projects to meet the current needs of the war. “People with vast knowledge in the field of NLP, vision, and more are building tools that will help fight disinformation and fake news and also help locate and find the people who got kidnapped,” he explained. “Everyone here is working now at 200% of their capacity.”

AI startups have provided some of Israel’s biggest tech success stories

Tech has long been Israel’s fastest growing sector, boasting over 10% of Israel’s labor force. AI startups, in particular, have provided some of the country’s biggest business success stories recently: These include AI21 Labs, which recently joined the unicorn club with a funding round of $155 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion; Pinecone, the vector database company that raised $100 million in April; and Gong, another Israeli-founded unicorn that uses AI to transform revenue teams.[…]

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