There’s a narrative circulating throughout the local ecosystem that Israel has fallen behind when it comes to AI.
Compared to the cybersecurity sector, where Israel is widely recognized as the global leader, this may be true. It’s also hard to argue when using the number of impactful foundation model companies as a proxy for success in AI.
The most obvious cases of an abundance of AI talent are found in the US and China. The US has delivered OpenAI and Anthropic, and is home to Google, Meta, Nvidia, xAI, and a laundry list of impressive enterprises and cutting-edge AI startups. China, too, has proven it is making a global impact with Deepseek, Kimi, Bytedance (Doubao), and more.
And that makes sense. The US and China are the two global superpowers of our times. They have virtually unlimited capital to funnel into AI development, have large and well-educated populations, and house the most preeminent academic institutions in the world.
The US and China should not be the measuring stick. The rest of the world should be, though. And Israelis are deeply embedded in many of the most impactful companies, projects, and research in the AI industry.
To help demonstrate this, today we’re launching The TLV AI 50, a collection of 50 of the most influential Israeli AI leaders around the world.
A few notes about this list:
- This list is focused on the current wave of AI. It’s focused on current and future impact.
- There are Israeli AI pioneers like Amnon Shaashua and Shai Shalev-Shwartz, who founded Mobileye and continue to help birth Israeli AI companies like AAI and Mentee, there’s Avigdor Willenz, who is behind some of the most impactful semiconductor investments that power AI, there’s Michael Kagan, who serves as the global CTO of Nvidia and co-founded Mellanox, and also Professor Judah Pearl, who is one of the fathers of Bayesian networks.
- This list is not exhaustive.
- Other impressive and impactful individuals could be on this list. We hope that many more modern-day AI leaders will emerge in the coming months and years, ensuring the future success of Israel’s AI efforts.
- This is not a ranking. This is a collection of impressive individuals who are all impacting AI in different ways.
- The list is split into three categories of people:
- Researchers: Individuals primarily focused on furthering the advancement of AI model development.
- Founders: Founders of AI companies that have and/or are currently making a global impact.
- Next-Gen: The up and coming leaders who are likely to have an outsized impact on the future of Israel’s AI efforts.
- This list does not include Ilya Sutskever. He is obviously the most impactful individual in AI with Israeli citizenship. The goal of this list is to highlight the Israelis who are not in the global spotlight but are nonetheless producing a global impact.
A quick glance at this list proves that Israelis are at the forefront of AI in the largest enterprises, startups, and research organizations in the world. It proves that our local academic institutions host world-class talent, training the younger generations. And it proves that there’s a promising young generation of leaders in the space.
One additional observation that we’d like to draw attention to is the promising new trend of elite Israeli mathematicians, who have been training since childhood and competing in international Olympiads, and have historically gravitated towards the cybersecurity industry but are now joining frontier AI labs. This bodes well for the future of Israeli AI talent.
That said, this list is not an accomplishment that should be waved around to prove to doubters that Israelis are making a difference in AI. Rather, it is our hope that this list serves as motivation to continue to invest in Israeli AI talent. We also hope that it’s a call to action for many more talented Israelis to dedicate their time to furthering the efforts of Israeli AI companies and academic institutions.
We believe that Israel has the opportunity to be the source of the most impactful AI talent in the world, and we’re off to a great start. Now it’s time to double down.
Shana Tova,
TLV Partners
