Mobileye is founded
Amnon Shashua founded a company in Jerusalem that bet on a single camera instead of radar and lasers for driver assistance.
Why it matters
Computer vision reached production cars before driverless ones did, and it did so outside the usual centres of AI.
The bet on monocular vision was contentious: most held that distance could not be judged without a rangefinder. Mobileye showed that a system trained on examples gives sufficient accuracy at a small fraction of the cost. In early 2017, before the Intel deal, its EyeQ chips were in about 15 million cars, and Intel bought the company for 15 billion dollars. It is the largest AI story that begins in Israel.