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Comment by danielovichdk | Hacker News Reader

"It will focus on building a small highly trusted team of researchers and engineers split between Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel."

Why Tel Aviv in Israel ?

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Ilya went to university in israel and all founders are jewish. Many labs have offices outside of the US, like london, due to crazy immigration law in the us.

There are actually a ton of reasons to like London. The engineering talent is close to bay level for fintech/security systems engineers while being 60% of the price, it has 186% deductions with cash back instead of carry forward for R&D spending, it has the best AI researchers in the world and profit from patents is only taxed at 10% in the UK.

If London has the best AI researchers in the world, why are all the top companies (minus Mistral) American?

Demis Hassabis says that half of all innovations that caused the recent AI boom came from DeepMind, which is London based.

his opinion is obviously biased.

If we say that half of innovations came from Alphabet/Google, then most of them (transformers, LLMs, tensorflow) came from Google Research and not Deep Mind.

People are choosing headquarters for access to capital rather than talent. That should tell you a lot about the current dynamics of the AI boom.

Google Deepmind is based in London.

Many companies have offices outside because of talent pools, costs, and other regional advantages. Though I am sure some of it is due to immigration law, I don't believe that is generally the main factor. Plus the same could be said for most other countries.

Part of it may also be a way to mitigate potential regulatory risk. Israel thus far does not have an equivalent to something like SB1047 (the closest they've come is participation in the Council of Europe AI treaty negotiations), and SSI will be well-positioned to lobby against intrusive regulation domestically in Israel.

Ilya also lived in Israel as a kid from age 5 to 15 so he speaks Hebrew. His family emigrated from Russia. Later they moved to Canada.

Source: Wikipedia.

Two of the founders are Israeli and the other is French, I think (went to University in France).

Israel is a leading AI and software development hub in the world.

> Israel is a leading AI and software development hub...

Yep, and if any place will produce the safest AI ever, its got to be there.

Safest place for AI? Their miltary has the worse track and a complete fascist state. Israel is the worst place to fund "safe and humane AI"

Israeli military operations continues to this day with over 41,000 civilians killed.

Pretty sure they're being sarcastic.

I wasn't aware of his or any of the other founders background. Simply thought it was political somehow.

Thanks.

Because it's a startup hub, there is great engineering talent there, and the cost of living is lower than the US.

Cost of living is extremely high in Tel Aviv, but the rest is true.

For the region, yes. Compared to the US, it's closer to Houston and Chicago, and way less that the typical tech hubs like the Bay or NYC.

Israel is geographically pretty small though -- I'm guessing you could live an hour up or down the coast and have it be an outrageous commute for people accustomed to the Bay Area?

Why not? The Bay isn't the only place with talent. Many of the big tech powerhouse companies already have offices there. There's also many Israeli nationals working the US that may find moving back closer to family a massive advantage.

Is it as open to outsiders as the Bay is? I’m Asian for example and it seems the society there is far more homogenous than in the Bay. I have no idea so I’m curious.

Israel has insane engineering and science talent.

Absolute deal breaker for me, and many others. I hope they fail.

Israel is the largest AI startup hub.

Daniel is Israeli.

It's the biggest concentration of Ashkenazi Jews outside of the US.

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