Get The AJN Newsletter by email and never miss our top stories
Free Sign Up
At the consumer level, generative AI software such as ChatGPT has changed the way many people live and work, with the ability to marshall customised information at their fingertips, and because of its sheer speed and ingenuity, there is a considerable tolerance among users for the inevitable errors.
However, in high-end professional applications, that tolerance has to be significantly narrower, as it can involve damage that runs into millions of dollars. Israeli company AI21 Labs fills that space by customising generative AI solutions to the premium requirements of corporations, retailers and government.
Asaff Zamir, AI21 Labs vice-president, sales & post-sales, visited Australia last month. With support from the Australia-Israel Chamber of Commerce, the company has struck up relationships with 18 potential clients, nine each in Sydney and Melbourne, in areas such as retail, banking and healthcare. Zamir hopes to return soon to advance at least some of these to contracts.
While in Australia, Zamir addressed more than 100 members of Israelis in Tech, a Melbourne-based support group keenly interested in the future of AI.
Founded in 2017 by Israeli AI specialists Professors Amnon Shashua, Yoav Shoham and Ori Goshen (the latter two are co-CEOs), AI21 Labs sees its mission as partnering with clients on their AI requirements 鈥 precision, security and scalability 鈥 rather than offering out-of-the-box products.
Some companies have been trialling 鈥榣arge-language models鈥 (LLMs) such as ChatGPT but 鈥渁re stuck in an endless loop of experimentation because they cannot push it to a place where they can trust the results enough to take it into a production environment鈥, Zamir told The AJN from Israel this week.
鈥淔rom our experience, solving actual problems and generating real business value is still very low. The market wants accurate and sophisticated AI agents.鈥 This is where AI21 Labs offers customised solutions, he explains.
From a business perspective, AI21 Labs has met the challenges of the war. 鈥淲e are a global company, so we have enough resources and plans to keep going even in a situation like that,鈥 said Zamir, noting that the Tel Aviv-based company鈥檚 international positioning is keeping it resilient. It has representation in North America, Europe and the Philippines, and has investor backing from tech majors such as Nvidia, Google and Intel, and a capital base of $US336 million.
In Europe, it partners with French multinational Fnac, harnessing LLM technology to help the retail giant enhance promotional descriptions for its products and meet constantly changing regulatory requirements.
Zamir has an emphatic response to those who lament that generative AI will replace humans in the workplace. 鈥淭here鈥檚 a large buzz around AI, that it鈥檚 here to replace humans. I think it鈥檚 the opposite. I believe that AI gives us what I call super power 鈥 to be more efficient and to actually be able to focus on what really matters and fulfil our real potential in the workplace, rather than be buried in manual tasks.鈥