September 24, 2026

Meet the Jews Who’ve Been Innovating Artificial Intelligence Since Before You Even Used a PC

Artificial Intelligence (colloquially known as AI) has been a hot topic over the past several years. The most famous of these AIs is known as “Generative AI”. Tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have been “wow”-ing the world with their ability to solve complex problems, complete tasks, generate writing, and more. Proponents of these tools often claim they will usher in a new era of productivity and innovation, often likening the AI craze to historic tech revolutions such as that of personal computing and the internet itself. Critics of generative AI raise a number of points, such as alleged theft of copyrighted materials by these models (used to “train” the models on what to say and output), environmental concerns about the harm caused by AI datacenters, and the proliferation of what has come to be known as “AI slop” across the internet. While there is a healthy array of differing opinions on the topic, it seems that, regardless of anyone’s personal opinions on it, generative AI is certainly here to stay. In this article, we will introduce you to a few of the Jewish tech experts, entrepreneurs, and other AI enthusiasts who have played significant roles in the development of the world’s most powerful and popular generative AI tools.

Early Pioneers: Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, and Herbert Simon

Minsky, McCarthy, and Simon are regarding as being among the founding fathers of artificial intelligence. In 1956, Ivy League research university Dartmouth College ran the Dartmouth Summer Research Project (DSRP), a workshop widely regarded as the birthplace of artificial intelligence as a discipline. McCarthy (1927-2011) organized the DSRP, and is credited with coining the term “artificial intelligence” itself. He later invented programming language Lisp in 1958. Lisp was foundational to AI research for decades. Minsky (1927-2016) co-founded major AI laboratories with McCarthy at MIT. A cognitive and computer scientist, he built an early neural network learning machine during his graduate studies. He also authored and co-authored influential works on neural networks, such as Perceptrons (1969) and The Society of Mind (1986). Simon (1916-2001) co-created the Logic Theorist in 1956. The Logic Theorist was capable of proving mathematical theorems, and it is widely regarded as the first true Artificial Intelligence computer program. He later created the General Problem Solver, which was an early attempt at a general-purpose reasoning system. As a testament to the lasting influence of these three men, they have all been made recipients of the prestigious Turing Award. The Turing Award is given annually to recipients who have made lasting and major technical contributions to the field of computer science (it is colloquially known as the “Nobel Prize of Computing”). Minsky received the award in 1969; McCarthy received it in 1971; and Simon achieved it jointly with his non-Jewish colleague Allen Newell in 1975.

Judea Pearl

Born and raised in Tel Aviv, Pearl (b. 1936) is known for reshaping how machines (and researchers themselves) engage in reasoning when faced with uncertainty and cause. After moving to the United States in 1960, he joined the faculty of UCLA in 1970, where he has made his career as a professor of computer science and statistics. Pearl’s main innovation was bringing artificial intelligence beyond traditional computational binaries, and into the depth and complexity of actual human experience. Previously, artificial intelligence rested on what is known as “Boolean” logic, which are simple statements of either “true” or “false”. Pearl developed the Bayesian network, which employs complex Bayesian statistics and graph theory to enable machines to form plausible hypotheses when faced with information that is incomplete or uncertain, rather than to hit an error, crash, or stop running a program (as would be the case with traditional binary computing). He later developed mathematical frameworks focusing on causation, including the famous “do-calculus”. As a result of his contributions, he received the Turing Award in 2011.

Amnon Shashua

If you’ve taken a ride in a car built in the last few years by Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Volkswagen, or a number of other manufacturers, you may have experienced features such as Adaptive Cruise Control, Lane Keep Assist, and other driver-assistance features that make driving a car easier and safer than ever. Credit for these innovations goes largely to Amnon Shashua (b. 1960), an Israeli computer scientist who made a radical proposal in the late 1990s: computer cameras driven by computer vision algorithms, rather than expensive and complex sensor arrays, could enable a vehicle to perceive and interpret its surroundings and the road ahead with enough accuracy to assist a human driver. Driven by his vision (double pun intended), he co-founded Mobileye in 1999, a global leader in advanced driver-assistance technology. Mobileye’s hardware and software is now used in tens of millions of vehicles, especially those of manufacturers mentioned in the above paragraph. What is so remarkable about Mobileye’s systems is that they only require one fairly simple camera to interpret objects and calculate trajectories in their view; there is no need for what would traditionally be a bulky, expensive sensor array to do the same thing. Next time you’re driving (or a passenger in) a newer vehicle equipped with Mobileye’s driver assistance technology, sit back and enjoy yourself – thanks to the realization of Shashua’s vision, it’s going to be an easy, smooth, and safe ride!

OpenAI’s Sam Altman

So far, the Jewish pioneers we’ve covered have mostly made direct technical advancements in the field of artificial intelligence. Sam Altman (b. 1985) is much different; often compared to tech visionaries like Steve Jobs, he is an entrepreneur and business leader who turned frontier AI research from something locked up in university laboratories into a product now used by billions of people around the world. After dropping out of Stanford University, Altman founded an app called Loopt that enabled users to share their location with other users. He eventually moved on to work at Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that helps promising tech startups get funding and resources to build new products and services, eventually becoming its president for several years until stepping down in 2019. After stepping down from Y Combinator, Altman focused his attention on artificial intelligence company OpenAI, becoming its CEO in 2019. Starting in 2015, he had served as a cochair alongside Elon Musk (who left the company in 2018). For several years, OpenAI developed LLM models in relative quiet. This changed in November 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public. The reaction was explosive: within 5 days, ChatGPT had 1 million users; and within 2 months, it had 100 million monthly active users, making it what was at that point the fastest-growing consumer software application in history. As of 2026, we live in a world that, for better or for worse, has been fundamentally altered by Altman’s release of the incredible AI software that ChatGPT is to the public. ChatGPT continues to hold roughly 1 billion global monthly active users, making it one of the most pervasive pieces of software in human history. Whether one chooses to see it as a glorified homework machine, a revolutionary assistant for intense professional workflows, or something in between, nobody can argue that Altman’s leadership of OpenAI hasn’t had a significant impact on how we interact with our technology and the world.

Anthropic’s Dario and Daniela Amodei

There is Coke, and there is Pepsi; there is McDonald’s, and there is Burger King; there is Toyota, and there is Honda; and there is ChatGPT, and there is Claude. And in the case of ChatGPT and Claude, both of them have Jewish visionary leaders overseeing today’s tech and shaping tomorrow’s. After working for Altman’s OpenAI, siblings Dario (b. 1983) and Daniela (b. 1987) Amodei left the company in 2021 to pursue what they saw as a more safety-first approach to developing AI tools. Together they founded Anthropic, maker of Claude. Anthropic was formed as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), an alternative corporate structure to classic forms such as a Limited Liability Company (LLC). The PBC structure gives Anthropic more flexibility to weigh social benefits and other concerns alongside commercial concerns, as opposed to the traditional American corporate form that mandates shareholder primacy (as in, the primary duty of a corporation’s directors and officers is to maximize shareholder profits/value). One of the Amodei siblings’ most notable research approaches is called Constitutional AI, a method which trains models to follow a specific set of guiding labels, rather than an unwieldy amount of minute, hairsplitting individual rules. Their leadership at Anthropic has led Claude to boast monthly active users estimated to exceed 200 million. While Anthropic’s LLM models seem to lag behind OpenAI’s in terms of raw active user count, Claude is known for attracting enterprise customers and “power users”. As a result, Anthropic is actually estimated to be collecting not only far more revenue, but is projected to actually produce an operating profit (as opposed to OpenAI estimated to be multiple billions of dollars in the negative for 2026).

What’s Next?

The AI race has been hot and heavy for the past few years, and there’s no sign of it slowing down any time soon. By the time you finish reading this article, a new groundbreaking model may be released to the public that makes all of the narrative written up to this point outdated. By the time you share it with your friends, that new model might have figured out how to do your job 90% faster than you at a fraction of the cost. Hopefully you’ll be alright though. But on that note, you should definitely share this article with your friends and family. And feel free to reach out to us at [email protected] if you have any thoughts on it!

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