Amnon Shashua

Amnon Shashua (born 1960) is a professor of computer science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and one of the most commercially successful AI researchers alive. He founded Mobileye in 1999 to put computer vision behind the windshield; Intel bought it for $15.3 billion in 2017 — then the largest acquisition in Israeli tech history — and returned it to the Nasdaq in 2022 with Shashua still at the wheel. His portfolio of ventures spans OrCam (AI vision aids for the blind), the digital bank One Zero, robotics startup Mentee, and AI21 Labs, the large-language-model company he co-founded in 2017, years before ChatGPT made the field fashionable.

From lane detection to language models

Shashua’s optimism is an engineer’s, not a futurist’s. In a February 2024 Jerusalem Post interview he was blunt about present limits — “AI today will not solve the difficult problems of humanity. It will create a PowerPoint or Excel sheet for me, summarize a search, or handle my calendar” — while predicting that within five to ten years AI systems will do genuine science. On jobs, he told the Post the disruption cuts both ways: “The negative way is that it will replace [some] jobs. The positive way: It will make our life more interesting regarding what we do.”

He has also put AI21 forward as “the Mobileye of AI,” raising at a $1.4 billion valuation in 2023 and later confirming acquisition talks with Nvidia and others. His anti-precautionary stance on regulation places him firmly opposite Europe’s AI Act approach — a position critics say is convenient for a man with several AI companies to run, and supporters say is earned by decades of shipping safety-critical AI into hundreds of millions of cars.