The Abu Dhabi Technological Innovation Institute (TII) announced on Monday that it will open a new research center in Haifa, Israel, headed by a former Amazon executive named Yoelle Maarek.
Maarek applauded the announcement as both an exciting development in A.I. research and a landmark in warming relations between Israel and the Arab nations of the Abraham Accords.
TII is a state-run institution founded by the Advanced Technology Research Council of the Abu Dhabi government in 2020. TII styles itself as a “disruptor in science” with a network of international partners.
The TII’s flagship product to date is Falcon 180B, an advanced open-source language model for A.I. systems released in September.
Falcon is the biggest, fastest Large Language Model (LLM) available to programmers today — in essence, it is the component of an artificial intelligence system that talks to human users in conversational language rather than program code. LLMs are not written in quite the same way as other software applications — they must be “trained,” or grown, by feeding them a huge database of human language interactions from which they can learn.
The latest iteration of Falcon is not far behind the freely available version of the famed GPT chatbot, and its open-source coding could make it more compatible with heavily regulated markets like the European Union.
Yoelle Maarek is an Israeli citizen born in Tunisia. She is one of Israel’s leading computer scientists. In addition to Amazon, she has worked for IBM, Yahoo, and Google. She launched the Google Engineering Center in Haifa in 2006 as its first director. One of her team’s projects was Suggest, the feature that automatically completes queries typed in Google and YouTube search boxes.
Maarek wrote on LinkedIn that she was “thrilled” to begin the “incredibly exciting new adventure” of opening the TII research center in Haifa.
“We will work on some of the most interesting challenges in A.I. and at the same time contribute to the vision of scientific collaboration articulated in the Abraham Accords. I could not wish for a more exciting and meaningful adventure,” she wrote.
“And yes we are hiring! Looking for talented and fun researchers and applied scientists in generative A.I. and Information Retrieval!” she added.
Maarek said on LinkedIn that the TII center in Haifa would work on “fascinating challenges in artificial intelligence while contributing to the vision of scientific cooperation outlined in the Abraham Accords.”
The Abraham Accords were the Trump administration’s effort to broker normalized relations between Israel and Arab countries. The UAE signed a bilateral Abraham Accords agreement with Israel in September 2020.
Jewish Business News (JBN) on Tuesday took it as a very good sign that “business and technological ties between Israel and the United Arab Emirates continue to grow” despite the war between Israel and Hamas.
JBN predicted the Abraham Accords nations would preserve good relations with Israel over the long term because, while they must pay lip service to the Palestinian cause, they know Hamas is “backed by Iran” — the greatest regional threat to their own security.