General Motors have for the last nine years been quietly pursuing strategies to amass driverless software and other technological talent at their Advanced Technical Centre in Herzliya, just north of Tel Aviv in Israel. Like the West Coast of the U.S., the small Middle Eastern country has become a major recruiting ground for digital and software talent. Global automakers including Ford, Daimler, Renault, Nissan, and China’s SAIC have opened technical centres in the country.
After Silicon Valley, Israel boasts the largest number of startups globally at about 6,000, said Gil Golan, director of GM’s site, making it fertile ground for new ideas and software expertise useful to automakers. GM’s location is shoehorned in amongst others with familiar corporate high-tech names such as Apple, as well as scores of startups. “Hundreds” of startups in the country are dedicated to the automotive business, he said, primarily driven by an abundance of young engineers, entrepreneurs, and scientists with advanced skills in software.
Interest among Israeli entrepreneurs in self-driving and autonomous startups no doubt has been stimulated in part by the celebrity of Mobileye, the Jerusalem-based machine vision and machine learning company focused on autonomous drive systems.
Last month GM staged a hack-a-thon at their Herzliya offices. The contest to create the best computer code in 24 hours attracted 500 young coders, scientists, and engineers. GM ordered in pizza and encouraged the two-, three-, and four-person teams to spend the night working at their offices. GM awarded the winning team an all-expenses-paid trip to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January.
The nontraditional skills sought most avidly by GM and automakers center on artificial intelligence and machine learning, sophisticated programs that emulate the human brain’s decision-making powers and its ability to learn and adjust decisions based on new information—both seen as essential for creating cars that drive themselves safely. GM declined to discuss specifically how AI/ML activities in Israel blend with those in Silicon Valley, Detroit and elsewhere.
“Israel is becoming an important hub for automotive and personal mobility future technologies,” said Ariella Grinberg-Felder, a GM innovation manager. “As GM was the pioneer in recognising this potential a decade ago, we are now well-positioned to capture the full potential for the benefit of GM.”
