Amnon Shashua’s AI startup AA-I Technologies revealed

Professor Amnon Shashua founded an artificial general intelligence (AGI) startup, which is still in the dark. AGI is developing the ability to surpass human capabilities in performing complex tasks in a short time, such as developing drugs or inventing a new energy source. The startup, called AA-I Technologies The company was founded last year in Jerusalem, and sources believe the company has already raised tens of millions of dollars to purchase equipment and graphics processors.

AA-I Technologies was revealed this week when Amazon Web Services (AWS) listed 80 startups accepted into its 2024 Generative AI Accelerator program. The Generative AI Accelerator program provides startups with direct access to its servers, including fast AI processors, and awards startups $1 million. At the end of the program, startups must pitch their products at an event in Las Vegas in December, to an audience of top executives from the worlds of technology and finance.

AWS did not specify that it was a subsidiary of Shashua, only that AA-I was a Jerusalem-based company that “develops artificial intelligence systems capable of solving computer science, mathematics and science problems at the highest level of human expertise.”

“The company is still in hiding.”

According to information in the corporate registry, AA-I was founded in August 2023 by Shashua, his partner in Mentee Robotics Shai Shalev Schwartz, and several promising scientists who were Shashua’s students in the Hebrew University’s computer science department, including Dr. Yoav Levin, Dr. Or Sharir (former scientists at Shashua’s AI21 Labs AI company), and Dr. Noam Weiss, an algorithm expert recruited from Orcam, another company in Shashua’s portfolio.

The company declined to respond to questions from Globes, though Shashua said earlier this month at the Goldfarb Gross Seligman and PwC Israel Up & Coming conference that he had recently founded a startup, but did not name it. “I founded an AI company 10 months ago, and it’s still operating in the shadows,” he said.

Asked why investing billions of dollars in companies in this field is a profitable business, Shashua alluded to the AGI revolution, saying: “Unlike the technological waves of the past, in this wave there are signs that general intelligence will develop somewhere soon, and the goal is for these systems to be able to mimic human intelligence in solving problems.”

In an interview with Globes in August 2023, near the founding of AA-I Technologies and after completing another funding round for AI21 Labs, Shashua offered a glimpse of where he was aiming: “Can AI imitate the qualities of a great mathematician or physicist? Can it invent the theory of relativity or develop calculus as a tool to develop laws like Newton’s? It’s a question of abstraction that smart people know how to do and language models haven’t been trained to do. That’s the next stage of AI,” he said.

This article was published in Globes, Israeli Business News – en.globes.co.il – on September 16, 2024.

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