Uri Frank: Google has been in AI for many years

• Published date: 17 April 2024
• Author: Hezi Sternlicht and Roi Weinberger
• Publication title: Globes (Rishon LeZion, Israel)

In a unique panel at the "Globes" Tech IL conference moderated by "Globes" technology editor Assaf Gilead, senior managers of the world's three leading chip companies gathered on one stage to discuss the future of the industry: Intel corporate vice president Daniel Benatar, co-general manager of Intel Worldwide Semiconductor Manufacturing and co-general manager of Intel Israel; Uri Frank, vice president of engineering and general manager of the chip implementation and innovation team at Google Cloud; and Amit Krig, senior vice president of software R&D at Nvidia and head of Nvidia's Israel development center

Krig was asked whether AI, or at least the share prices of companies in that field, amounted to a kind of bubble, and he explained that this was not the case. "We're just at the beginning of the road in harnessing AI to more areas. In every area that we touch, it's possible to make extensive use of AI - in medicine, video, in fact anything."

The panel moderator Assaf Gilead asked the participants where Israel stood in AI and what was being developed in Israel. Krig responded that building a supercomputer like Open AI required tens, even hundreds, of thousands of servers with very efficient communications between them, and that some of the calculations would be performed on the network. This, he said, was where Israel's greatest contribution came in, and so the country was very important for Nvidia.

It's claimed that not enough new AI startups are coming up here, and that most of the companies are concentrated in other places, such as San Francisco and the UAE, so that Israel has missed out on the AI era.

Krig: "It's hard to say missed out, but much more needs to be invested, first of all in Israel's infrastructure, because the human capital exists. We built a supercomputer, and we intend to make it accessible to startups. So we haven't missed out, and we do need to invest much more, with the investment coming from the government, and of course from the big companies, in order to expand the pool of startups."

Uri Frank sees the AI revolution as only at the beginning. "If we look at this field in future years, there are applications that we can't even begin to imagine. So it's not true that Israel has missed out. Certainly, there are some main players, but if we look ten years ahead, there are plenty of opportunities," Frank said. This was a first public appearance for Frank, formerly a VP at Intel who left that company in 2021 to manage the development of server chips at Google that incorporate graphics accelerators and a core processor that were unveiled at an event held by the company last week..

Daniel Benatar said that the State of Israel had an advantage that started with education. "School prepares its pupils for the colleges and universities, and if we channel them to artificial intelligence, and continue to produce brilliant minds here, we'll continue to create an advantage. It has to be a cooperative effort with the...