A Growing Gulf Between Israel and AI
AI Vey: Israel, a regional AI talent powerhouse, not invited to US-Saudi summit focused on AI. Plus lots of other stories and updates.
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Today’s Agenda:
Israel, an AI superpower, is absent from Trump’s Gazillions in The Gulf bonanza
Apple’s Israel CEO Opens Vision Pro Kimono
Fiverr is turning from a marketplace to a platform
AI Agent maker enso is turning from a platform to a marketplace
Packed week of news, new startups, and funding rounds
A Growing Gulf between Israel and AI
TL:DR: Israel was notably absent from the US-Saudi economic summit focused on AI, despite being a regional AI talent powerhouse.
The U.S.–Saudi economic summit in Riyadh this week, staged under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and President Trump, looked more like a Silicon Valley board offsite than a state visit.
Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Jensen Huang, Alex Karp and the CEOs of IBM, Amazon, Andreessen Horowitz, Epic Games and Uber all jetted in to chart the future of Artificial Intelligence and energy.
Yet Israel, the region’s vaunted AI powerhouse, wasn’t on the guest list. In fact, the only tenuous Israeli link was Alphabet and Google President and Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat, whose mother Frieda was born in Mandatory Palestine. Bless you Frieda.
The tech chiefs entourage, and the billions committed to AI and defense investments, capped an historic effort to fuse finance, infrastructure, semiconductors, and energy into an overall AI strategy that propels the US and its Middle East allies into the AI future.
Hold on. Middle East allies? Artificial Intelligence? Isn’t that like, totally Israel? Did I miss something? Why the snub?
I won’t go into all the reasons why Israel was left standing outside the club. Some commentators say it’s politics: Trump wants Saudi in the Abraham Accords and he wants their to usher in the NEW AMERICAN GOLDEN AGE. The Saudis want Israel to end the Gaza war and commit to a pathway toward a Palestinian state. Prime Minister Netanyahu has other plans.
Perhaps. But politics aside, here’s another angle: When the US and Saudi administrations and their tech czars look at the Middle East, they see fabulously wealthy petrostates transitioning their economies and societies to knowledge industries driven by AI. Underpinning this historic transition from oil to knowledge are ginormous investments in AI infrastructure like data centers, energy, and education. They see vast kingdoms with plenty of space and solar energy to power these energy hungry AI’s (but with enough oil to keep Western economies going). They see forward-thinking leaders empowering their youngest generations with the tools, money, and education they’ll need to lead the world in advanced technologies.
And when they turn their gaze to Israel? They see an incredible startup industry, the envy of the world. Big exits. The world’s highest concentration of AI-skilled talent (1.98 percent), and female representation in AI roles at almost three times the global average. Generative-AI companies here rank third globally, while “vertical AI” in defense, life-sciences and finance draws nearly half of private investment.
But talent alone isn’t enough. Look deeper and the picture becomes less compelling. From Silicon Valley to Saudi Arabia, Israel looks like a tiny country, beset by conflict, hijacked by extremist narratives, internationally isolated, and, crucially, suffering from chronic underinvestment in energy, data, and transportation infrastructure. They see education budgets prioritizing religious education, with STEM as an afterthought. Underpaid teachers are regularly on strike. Meanwhile, in the UAE, teachers are already rolling AI into every grade from kindergarten through year 12, cementing a pipeline from primary school to PhD. But when they look at Israel, they see an AI brain drain.
The world’s focus has shifted from talent to transformers: the substations, cables and cooling plants that deliver power at scale. And while Israel struggles to refresh, recruit, and retain its AI talent, let alone build out its AI infrastructure, the Gulf is pulling far ahead on transformers.
Power is Money
This week's Riyadh summit saw Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and President Trump preside over $600 billion in commitments spanning defense, energy, and technology. Saudi's state-owned AI champion, Humain, will deploy 18,000 specialist Nvidia servers—an investment worth "multiple billions." AMD pledged up to $10 billion alongside Humain; Amazon committed $5 billion to data centers; DataVolt promised $20 billion for U.S. AI infrastructure. These headline figures point to the real leverage: electrons.
The Gulf is fusing vast solar farms, nuclear reactors, and subsidized grid capacity to create near-limitless, low-cost power for hyperscale GPU clusters (the kinds that power ChatGPT and much else in AI). The UAE's Barakah complex already delivers a quarter of its electricity; Saudi's Desert Dragon initiative promises 187 MW of dedicated data-center power across four cities. Fast-track permitting, cheap land, and sovereign wealth strip away the usual bottlenecks of planning delays and high energy tariffs. Fast-track permitting, cheap land and sovereign wealth underwriting strip away the usual bottlenecks of land-use battles, planning delays and sky-high energy tariffs.
Chips Fall Where They Maybe
From Israel’s perspective, Washington hasn’t helped. Under Biden’s AI Diffusion Framework, Israel is capped at 50,000 high-end processors per year through 2027—an “economy-class” limitation that Nvidia’s Israel country director warns will throttle both defense-critical compute and the broader startup ecosystem. Israeli startups have resorted to leasing GPU time in Frankfurt and Amsterdam, but such stopgaps carry latency, compliance and cost penalties.
Yet in Riyadh this week, David Sacks—White House AI and crypto czar—announced that the Trump administration will lift the tiered cap on exports of advanced U.S. AI chips to close allies, including Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Bloomberg and Reuters report the administration is weighing a pact to let the UAE import 500,000 high‑end Nvidia chips annually—ten times Israel’s allotment—through 2027.
As of this writing, Israel has not received any special exemption from the Catastrophic Chip Crunch. But Israel has a plan. To answer this unbelievably important and complex strategic challenge for the ages, Israel has built an AI strategy that can...oh wait…it hasn’t built an AI strategy? there isn't one yet? AI vey.
Strategy Sesh
Last week’s appointment of Jewish Power member of Knesset Almog Cohen—a yeshiva educated former militia leader and pizza parlor proprietor with no AI track record—as Deputy Minister for AI is a step, but in the wrong direction. It may please certain political constituencies, but it does nothing to address the hard constraints on AI growth in Israel. Cohen’s mandate—to shift Israel’s AI “centre of gravity” to the Negev and Galilee—runs headlong into the realities of a national grid designed for peacetime loads, not desert-scale data centers. Cooling systems guzzle water in a water-scarce region; upgrading transmission lines remains entangled in bureaucratic red tape; and local utilities lack the required capital.
So despite all this, what can Israel offer the new great powers of AI? And does Israel have what it takes to scale its AI chops to become one of the big players? Can it afford not to?
Israel must now make strategic choices.
Infrastructure before innovation
For Israel to wear its AI crown with confidence, it must move beyond startup success stories to foundational investments:
First, coordinate ministries to fast-track grid upgrades, explore renewables and modular nuclear capacity, and secure tier-one chip status from Washington.
Second, leverage military-grade AI and data operations expertise to build sovereign GPU farms, reducing dependence on European leasing arrangements.
Third, double down on small, domain-specific models in defense, healthcare and finance, where Israel's data advantages remain defensible.
Finally, scale the nascent GenAI security sector, where seed-round activity already signals global leadership potential.
Above all, Israel must reconceive AI as critical national infrastructure, on par with water and electricity, rather than a buzzword to be waved in political theatre.
This week’s AI and energy bonanza in the Gulf was a missed opportunity for collaboration in AI, especially as Israeli tech expertise could have contributed to the compute-for-carbon and solar-powered AGI initiatives discussed. The train for the future has left the station. Israel needs to decide if it wants to get on it at the next stop.
Vision Pro Israel
TL:DR Apple’s Israel CEO revealed Israeli engineers developed key Vision Pro headset technologies, highlighting the local team’s importance to Apple's post-iPhone strategy.
Apple broke with its usual tight control of product messaging and allowed its Israel CEO Roni Friedman to publicly present a comprehensive technical overview of its Vision Pro spatial computing headset at Tel Aviv's ChipEx2025 conference (ChiPortal, Hebrew). At $3,499 per headset, the Vision Pro uses specialized cameras that track your eye movements with remarkable precision, allowing you to select virtual objects just by looking at them. It also features advanced hand-tracking technology that detects subtle finger movements with "sub-millimeter accuracy" for manipulating digital content floating in your physical space.
Friedman unpacked the key advancements packed into the Vision Pro, several of which were developed in Israel by Apple’s local team, collaborating with global Apple teams:
Eye Tracking: Cameras analyze corneal reflections to track gaze for object selection and biometric authentication.
Multi-Camera System: Stereoscopic cameras capture 3D environment, side cameras track hands, depth cameras position virtual objects precisely.
Precision Hand Control: Tracks hand movements with sub-millimeter accuracy throughout the field of vision.
Dual-Processor System: M2 handles heavy computing while R1 processes real-time sensor data, communicating via high-speed connection.
Foveated Rendering: Displays high resolution only where you're looking, reducing pixel processing five-fold to save power.
Motion Sickness Prevention: Begins displaying content before frames are complete for faster reaction to movement.
Custom visionOS: Optimizes all hardware resources while maintaining low power consumption and precise timing between processes.
Vision Pro represents more than just Apple's entry into virtual/augmented reality. Friedman described it as the beginning of an entirely new category—Spatial Computing—that Apple plans to expand in the near future. “When you put on the Vision Pro, the screen becomes infinite. You control it with your hands and eyes, without a remote, without a keyboard, simply within the space," Friedman said.
Or a phone. That’s right, the company that became the most valuable by market cap in the world on the back of its iPhones, sees Vision Pro as the centerpiece of its post-iPhone chapter. Apple’s headset, and similar efforts by Google, Meta, Microsoft, and others have been in development for several years. The challenge these devices face on your face is two-fold: the first is technical—the devices are bulky, they carry onboard batteries that heat your head up, or they’re tethered to a power source like a laptop, meaning you can’t move around much. Reducing the size of the headset and figuring out the power and cooling dynamics is still going to take another 2-3 years, a source in the industry told me.
The second challenge Apple faces is consumer adoption: the idea behind wearing these headsets is that you won’t need to be staring at your phone’s screen while driving, crossing a street, or talking to your kids, the information you need will just appear in front of your eyes. But wearing these headsets outside or in the office could just drive us to be even more immersed in the ether, at the expense of what’s actually happening in the room. At the moment, most use cases I’ve heard of for the Vision Pro include watching movies and attending virtual meetings. You can’t wear these headsets for more than a few hours a day in aggregate before microwaving your head, so it remains to be seen whether headsets will be taking our eyes off our phone screens anytime soon. Now, what were you saying child? Of course daddy was listening to you.
Fiverr’s Freelancer Fiefdom
TL;DR: As AI reshapes freelance work, Fiverr pivots from marketplace to platform
Freelance services marketplace Fiverr's latest quarterly results reveal a company reinventing itself amid the AI revolution. Revenue climbed 14.6% year-on-year to $107.2 million, with adjusted EBITDA margin reaching 18.1%. Yet beneath these healthy figures lurks a troubling sign: annual active buyers plummeted 10.6% to 3.5 million—the company's lowest since its 2019 IPO. Marketplace revenue, Fiverr's traditional bread and butter, actually contracted by 0.8%.
The company is growing not by attracting more users, but by extracting more value from a dwindling user base. In Silicon Valley jargon, Fiverr is "pivoting from scale to yield." That shift is clearest in the explosion of Services revenue—up 94% year-on-year to $29.5 million. This includes Fiverr Pro, enterprise onboarding, and Fiverr Go, an AI tool suite launched in February 2025. Fiverr Go bundles two core features: a Personal Assistant that automates buyer communication, and AI Creation Models trained on a freelancer’s own work—things like voiceovers, logos, content, code. Freelancers retain control and set prices, while Fiverr charges $25/month for the models and $29/month for the Assistant. Early results are working in Fiverr’s favor: average spend per buyer rose 8.8% to $309.
This isn’t just product expansion—it’s architectural. Fiverr is transforming from neutral marketplace to fiefdom. It's embedding itself into freelancer workflows, monetizing production tools, and packaging scalable services for clients. And to keep elite freelancers loyal, Fiverr launched a Freelancer Equity Program in early 2025, granting stock to top performers. Meanwhile, freelancers have been transformed from partners to tenants, renting access to a platform they once simply used.
It's a bold strategy, perhaps inevitable. But the trade-offs are increasingly tangible: fewer clients, more platform control, and freelancers paying premiums for their own efficiency. Fiverr is still growing for now—but will its freelancers stick around?
In related news, Fiverr CEO Micha Kaufman sent an all-hands email, essentially saying AI was coming for their jobs.
Agent of Change: Mickey Haslavsky
While consumers have embraced chatbots like ChatGPT, a new breed of AI tools—AI Agents—is automating tasks that once required many human hands and were out of reach for most small businesses. Israeli start-up enso, a company that's building AI agents for non-technical users in small businesses, says it has attracted 3,000 paying customers in under a year by bundling these agents into an affordable subscription service, like a Netflix for Agents. At $49 monthly, even tree surgeons and cleaning companies can deploy sophisticated automation to run and grow their businesses. The implications for labor markets and small business competitiveness are profound. I spoke with enso founder and CEO Mickey Haslavsky, about how AI is reshaping business.
Amir: Let's start with the basics. What's the difference between chatbots and agents?
Mickey: Chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude are LLM-based chat systems that most people are using daily now. AI agents are actually automations—the evolution of tools like Zapier, Make, and Selenium. The fundamental difference is that with traditional automation, you had to define each step of a process. With AI agents, you simply tell the system what to do, and it figures out the steps using LLMs.
Amir: Can you give an example?
Mickey: Take OpenAI's Operator agent. In the past, if you wanted to book a restaurant table, you'd need to map all the steps—go to Google, navigate to OpenTable, fill specific fields. Now, you can just say, "I need a table for Thursday, we're four people, and we're vegetarian." The agent analyzes the screen and determines which steps to take.
Amir: So agents are about doing, while chatbots are about thinking?
Mickey: Exactly. LLMs (Large Language Models - the AI technology behind ChatGPT) are designed to help you think or write, and AI agents are designed to help you do. That's the fundamental difference.
Amir: That sounds like agents could be pretty disruptive.
Mickey: Agents are disrupting work, business, and entrepreneurship in two way: First, they're disrupting the workforce. You no longer need to hire freelancers for many tasks—it's cheaper and instantaneous to use an agent. Second, they're disrupting services. Tasks that once required expensive agencies can now be done at a fraction of the cost.
Amir: Does that mean platforms like Fiverr and Upwork (online marketplaces for freelance services) are doomed?
Mickey: They're not doomed, but they're being disrupted significantly. Fiverr was big for writing—now you go to ChatGPT. For videos, you use Heyday or similar tools. The platforms will evolve into larger organizations focused on helping people use these tools effectively. The world isn't binary.
Amir: Tell me about enso's approach to making agents accessible.
Mickey: We've built on two key insights. First, no matter how good LLMs become, non-technical people still struggle to utilize them effectively—they need to understand prompts and how things work. Second, software is becoming a commodity, which allows us to create a Netflix-like experience where users pay a monthly fee for an ever-growing amount of value.
Amir: What's your customer base like?
Mickey: We have about 3,000 customers after just one year. They're predominantly non-technical small businesses: cleaning services from Arizona, recruiting services from Michigan, Joshua Tree Experts providing tree care. These aren't tech companies.
Amir: And they all pay $49 per month?
Mickey: Yes. Small businesses often have multiple services or side hustles, and they can't afford separate tools for each one. We bundle numerous AI agents under one subscription, making it affordable to access capabilities that were previously out of reach.
Amir: What are your most popular agents?
Mickey: Our number one is a lead generation agent that scans the internet for potential customers. If you're looking for executives in insurance companies, it gathers those people into one list and allows you to pitch them via email with one click. It saves four to five hours of work and gets done in 30 seconds.
Another popular agent creates weekly content for your business and uploads it directly to Instagram. This eliminates three options: doing it yourself (time-consuming), hiring someone (expensive), or using multiple tools (complicated).
Amir: How do these agents access platforms like LinkedIn or Instagram?
Mickey: Through APIs. LinkedIn, Instagram, and others provide application programming interfaces (technical connections that allow different software to interact) that allow our agents to interact with their platforms. For platforms without APIs, some agents like Operator can visually analyze and interact with screens.
Amir: What's the long-term vision for enso?
Mickey: The end goal isn't for us to build all the AI agents ourselves—it's to become a marketplace. When people build AI agents using any tool, they'll be able to upload them to Enso, like products on Amazon. We'll be the distribution channel, which is why we're focusing so intensely on growth. This is the problem we solve for software developers building Agents/AI applications— now when its so easy to build with platforms like Base44 (see my story on Base 44 “It’s the End of the Coding World as we know it and he feels fine”) someone has to be the app store for it - and developers will always need distribution for their ideas.
Amir: What about more sensitive areas like taxes and banking?
Mickey: Those are definitely coming. Technical integration isn't the challenge—QuickBooks (accounting software) and banks have APIs—but we need to be more mature with the technology. If we write a weird paragraph for Facebook, you just regenerate it. If we tell you to pay less taxes than required, we're creating serious problems. As LLMs improve with context and reasoning, these capabilities will follow.
Amir: Are there already competitors for AI agent marketplaces?
Mickey: Not many—it's a challenging vision. One is Agent.ai, founded by Dharmesh Shah, the CTO of HubSpot (a popular marketing platform). AI agents are just now becoming good enough, but there will certainly be several app stores for them eventually.
Amir: This seems to upend a lot of ideas about business and careers.
Mickey: It does. Rather than people being automated out of existence, we're offering a different narrative: pay $50 monthly, choose your agents, and keep growing. It's creating opportunities for entrepreneurs who previously couldn't compete with larger organizations because the same powerful tools are now accessible to everyone at a commoditized price.
Agent of Change #2: Amos Bar-Yosef
Amos Bar-Yosef, co-founder of Swan AI, closed 71 deals in 60 days entirely on his own—without marketing spend, sales reps, or travel—using only AI agents that handle everything from content creation to lead qualification in his sales pipeline and customer tracking system. Bar-Yosef is not just building a business. He’s building what is a growing trend of “autonomous businesses” in which small, skilled teams achieve enterprise-scale growth through AI instead of hiring humans. Bar-Yosef calls it an Autonomous Business OS (Operating System, like iOS on your Apple phone).
Here’s how it works: One agent drafts LinkedIn posts that generate over a million monthly impressions, another analyzes more than 15,000 reactions to surface repeat prospects, a third automates hundreds of daily connection requests and follow-ups, while others filter website visitors into sales-ready leads, prepare briefing materials for weekly demos, and transcribe calls with automated follow-up emails. Together, they replicate the output of a 20-person growth team under a single human operator.
Swan’s success— building a $1.5 million sales pipeline in a month with just 2 people and a swarm of AI agents—demonstrates the massive shift that’s divorcing productivity from headcount, shifting spend on headcount to tech. With that kind of efficiency and scale, why would anyone hire humans anymore? (I wouldn’t). Bar-Yosef says he’s not replacing humans, he’s “amplifying them,” turning every founder into a “100x version of themselves.” (I thought an amplifier was what you stick an electric guitar into).
But fear not sacred human subscribers, a new report by MIT Sloan Management Review argues that when AI becomes common, it will boost the economy overall but won't give any single company a lasting competitive edge. To stay ahead, businesses should focus on fostering employee creativity.
All 3 stories above—Fiverr’s automation play, enso, and Swan’s Agents all point to one inescapable trend: The divorce of productivity from headcount.
Follow the money
Israeli quantum software co Classiq raises $110m (Globes) Go Deeper: Michael Spencer writes that Classiq might be the most important Venture Capital round for Quantum computing in 2025.
Defense startup Kela raises $60 million, reaches $100 million in first-year funding (CTech)
Israeli defense tech companies raised $280 million in 2025 (Jan-May), compared to $361 million in 2024. (IVC) Since October 7, 2023, over 300 Israeli defense tech startups have received orders worth 1.5 billion shekels, with annual orders reaching 800 million shekels. (Bizportal, Hebrew)
Despite contributing 18% of Israel's GDP, 53% of exports, and 25% of tax revenue, Israeli high-tech firms are fleeing the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE)—with zero tech IPOs in 2025 and just one in 2024, down from three in 2023. The exodus stems from 55% fewer institutional investments in 2024 (just $83M across 29 rounds) and stifling regulation, pushing startups toward global exchanges; reversing this demands tax incentives, lighter rules, and risk-sharing funds to keep Israel’s innovation—and economy—anchored at home. (Calcalist, Hebrew)
PhaseV, a biotech, raises $50M Series A to optimize clinical development. Israel Tech Insider Subscriber Saul Richmond, a former Director of Neurology & Rare Disease R&D at a multinational Biopharma company, says PhaseV’s approach is noteworthy. “While there is no shortage of attempts to improve efficiency of the space, this approach is interesting as the company is working to improve likelihood of clinical success (which currently stands at roughly 10% as a whole). This simple fact underpins much of the overall challenge in Biopharma.”
Somite AI raised $47 million from investors like Khosla Ventures, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and SciFi VC to develop AI tools that could make cell therapies faster and cheaper. Their technology aims to improve treatments for diseases like diabetes by simplifying how cells are grown and prepared.
Straight out of stealth and into an exit: IBM’s Red Hat acquires stealth Israeli startup Jounce for $20M to bolster AI cloud stack (CTech)
People on the Move
Nitzan Shapira and Ran Rabinzaft, founders of Epsagon which was sold to Cisco in 2021, are building a new startup that automates digital business processes for SMBs. TheMarker (Hebrew) says the company is like a “ServiceNow for SMBs” and has raised a seed round of $20 million led by Lightspeed.
Michael Gabay, formerly CEO of Trigo, has founded Velon, a new startup that builds Enterprise AI agents that execute tasks in procurement and supply chains—finally digitizing the byzantine world of procurement. These agents include expert category negotiators, buyers, and supply managers.
Vintage Investment Partners, a global venture capital platform with $4.3 billion in assets under management, has expanded its European presence by opening an office in London and appointing Leyla Holterud as Partner to lead its regional efforts. Vintage plans to accelerate investments in European venture capital, including secondary solutions and direct growth-stage investments.
In other news
S&P reaffirms Israel’s credit rating but maintains negative outlook amid war (Times of Israel)
Microsoft's development center in Israel has begun implementing a significant restructuring initiative as part of a global workforce reduction of approximately 3% (6,000-7,000 employees worldwide). The Israeli branch is expected to lay off up to 100 of its 3,000 employees while simultaneously making organizational changes aimed at flattening management structures. Despite the layoffs, Microsoft Israel continues to recruit employees and is expanding certain teams, indicating a strategic restructuring rather than just downsizing. (TheMarker, Hebrew)
New Intel CEO rejects calls to reconsider Israel activity. The proposal could have forced the company to hold a formal internal discussion about its continued investment and presence in Israel, where it maintains key development and manufacturing facilities outside the US, including the Kiryat Gat plant employing thousands. (Globes)
Israel's semiconductor chief Zvi Goultsman, who leads the Innovation Authority's chip division, has announced a 250 million shekel investment into a new semiconductor incubator. The strategy reflects a blunt reality: the country can't match Taiwan's fab billions but excels at chip design, where 70% of its semiconductor activity already concentrates. The program aims to double startups yearly by slashing entry costs and providing shared testing infrastructure. Goultsman, unveiling the strategy at ChipEx2025, is targeting three specific sectors—integrated photonics, power components, and advanced packaging—where Israel already holds technical advantages. Behind this focus lies troubling data: new chip startups have declined despite the sector generating billions in annual exports. (ChiPortal, Hebrew)
US chip export rules cancellation unlikely to help Israel soon. The Trump administration plans to replace the restrictions with bilateral agreements, but sees Israel as low priority. (Globes). Go Deeper: Nvidia Israel Chief Sounds Alarm Over US AI Chip Restrictions
Israeli Spyware Firms Can't Get Trump to Nix Sanctions Despite Defense-tech Boon (Haaretz). Go Deeper: Israel’s cyber-surveillance sector is collapsing
WSJ discovers Annapurna Labs, the Israeli startup Amazon acquired over a decade ago. The Stealthy Lab Cooking Up Amazon’s Secret Sauce. (WSJ Paywall)
Ramon.Space won a contract to upgrade Eutelsat OneWeb's satellites with digital communication technology, replacing older analog systems. The new system allows for better performance and flexibility, including the ability to update satellite functions while in orbit, and supports future projects like Europe's IRIS² satellite network.
The Atlas Academy of Defense, a tech education organization that offers defense sector professionals courses in cyber, AI, and digital transformation, has launched Israel’s first dedicated defense tech podcast. (Hebrew)
Immigration to Israel of US lawyers up 50% since war (Globes) God help us.
David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, engaged deeply with the concept of artificial intelligence in the late 1950s and early 1960s. (Haaretz/Paywall)
Rants by Techies
Yotam Gutman rants: Today there was a remote learning exercise for 7th grade classes. They received a file with instructions via WhatsApp that sent them to Google Classroom, which then directed them to the Ministry of Education’s authentication system, which sent a text message to the mom’s phone, and then they needed to link it to the class, and inside there was a Hebrew exercise on a Google Doc aligned to the left, and it wasn’t clear how to submit it.
What a broken flow, seriously.
It’s enough to make you pull your hair out.
My take: Yotam’s post perfectly captures parents’ frustration with Israel’s Education Ministry, which, despite past experiences like COVID-19 and regional conflicts, appears STILL unprepared for remote learning, This Startup Nation or what? What.
Not good. But PM Bennett will solve this.