The Abu Dhabi-based Technology Innovation Institute, which focuses on AI development, will open a new center in Haifa, to be spearheaded by research lead Yoelle Maarek, a former Amazon executive.
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In a post on the LinkedIn social network, Maarek expressed her excitement about working on "fascinating challenges in artificial intelligence while contributing to the vision of scientific cooperation outlined in the Abraham Accords".
She described it as "an incredibly thrilling and meaningful adventure." The new research institute is actively recruiting researchers and scientists specializing in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and information retrieval. These areas indicate the institute's focus on developing large language models (LLMs). Information retrieval is a crucial aspect of AI, particularly for commercial chatbot implementation.
The TII Institute, founded by the Abu Dhabi government in 2020, made headlines about six months ago with the release of Falcon, a powerful large language model. Regarded as one of the most advanced models in the open-source field, Falcon boasts impressive capabilities.
With its latest version comprising a staggering 180 billion parameters, it stands toe-to-toe with OpenAI's ChatGPT-4 model and doesn't lag behind Google's PaLM-2, despite being half its size. The institute proudly asserts that Falcon's performance is on par with these renowned models, marking a significant achievement in the field of language modeling.
Maarek's impressive resume includes serving as the Vice President of Research for Alexa Shopping, Amazon's innovative voice assistant shopping product, until September 2023. Before that, she held the positions of Vice President and Director of Research at Yahoo.
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Emirati and Israeli delegates signing an agreement at the first Abraham Accords Business Summit in Abu Dhabi on October 19, 2020 in the presence of US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin
(Photo: AFP)
Maarek was instrumental in establishing Google's inaugural research and development center in Haifa and has also contributed her expertise as a researcher at IBM. Her academic background is equally impressive, holding a doctorate in computer science from the Haifa-based Technion Institute of Technology.