Prof. Amnon Shashua has founded an artificial general intelligence (AGI) startup, which is still in stealth. AGI develops the ability to exceed human capabilities in performing complex tasks in a short time, such as developing medicines or inventing a new source of energy. The startup called AA-I Technologies was founded last year in Jerusalem and sources believe the company has already raised several tens of millions of dollars for the purchase of equipment and graphic processors.
AA-I Technologies was revealed this week when Amazon Web Services (AWS) listed the 80 startups that have been accepted to its 2024 Generative AI accelerator program. The accelerator provides the startups with direct access to its servers including rapid AI processors, and grants its startup $1 million, and at the end of the program the startups must present their product at an event to be held in December in Las Vegas, before an audience of senior executives from the world of technology and finance.
AWS did not detail that it was Shashua's company, and only stated that AA-I is a Jerusalem company that "develops an AI system that is capable of solving CS, math, and science problems at the highest level of human expertise."
"The company is still in stealth"
According to information at the registry of companies, AA-I was founded in August 2023 by Shashua and his partner at Mentee Robotics Shai Shalev-Shwartz and several promising scientists that were Shashua's students in the Department of Computer Science at the Hebrew University, including Dr. Yoav Levine, Dr. Or Sharir (formerly scientists at Shashua's generative AI company AI21 Labs), and Dr. Noam Weiss, an algorithmic expert recruited from Orcam, another company in Shashua's portfolio.
The company declined to respond to "Globes" questions although earlier this month Shashua told the Goldfarb Gross Seligman and PwC Israel Up & Coming conference that he had recently founded a startup but did not mention its name. He said, "10 months ago I founded an AI company, and it is still in stealth."
Shashua was asked why investing billions of dollars in companies in the field is a profitable business, and hinted about the AGI revolution. He said, "Unlike the technological waves in the past, in this wave there are signs that somewhere just around the corner a broad intelligence will develop here, and the intention is that those systems will be able to imitate human intelligence in solving problems."
In an interview with Globes in August 2023, close to the founding of the AA-I Technologies and after he had completed another financing round for AI21 Labs, Shashua offered a glimpse at where he was aiming: He said, "Can AI imitate the qualities of a great mathematician or physicist? Can it invent the theory of relativity or develop the differential calculus as a tool to develop laws like those of Newton? It is a matter of abstraction that smart people know how to do and language models have not been trained for this. This is the next stage of AI."
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 16, 2024.
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