For years, Israelis have comforted themselves with a familiar story: we may be small, but we know how to win in technology. We built a world-class cybersecurity sector, turned military experience into startups, talent, and exits at a scale wildly disproportionate to our size. So the assumption follows naturally: when it comes to artificial intelligence, Israel can simply do what it did in cyber.

That assumption is wrong.

AI is not cyber. It is not another software category waiting for Israeli ingenuity to carve out a respectable niche. It is a fundamentally different technological phenomenon, one that is rapidly becoming the base layer of all other industries.

In cyber, one could build point solutions in specific verticals around a large and durable market. In AI, many of those margins are temporary. The intelligence itself increasingly absorbs them.

To understand the problem, one must first understand the progression of AI itself. We began in the era of artificial narrow intelligence: systems built to do specific tasks. Image recognition. Recommendation systems. Fraud detection. Translation. Chess. Go.

Narrow systems were impressive, useful, and commercially valuable, but they were bounded. They did one thing, or a small number of related things, and did not generalize far beyond that.

Then came the modern large language model era, popularized globally by ChatGPT. Whatever one’s preferred technical definition of artificial general intelligence may be, the world undeniably crossed into a new epoch: AI systems are no software tools with one function, but flexible intelligence engines capable of performing an expanding range of cognitive labor.

From there, the center of gravity shifted again. We moved from chatbots to agents. A chatbot answers. An agent acts. It can use tools, browse, write code, make plans, call software, execute tasks across steps, and increasingly pursue goals with limited supervision. The importance of this shift cannot be overstated. Once AI becomes agentic it starts directly inserting itself into the economy in all verticals.

And with agents, we are now approaching the next threshold: recursive self-improvement.

AI is beginning to help build better AI: generating training data, improving code, accelerating research, and ultimately building the next version of themselves. The loop tightens. Intelligence starts to compound.

Beyond that lies what the leading frontier labs openly discuss: artificial superintelligence, followed by what many describe as the technological singularity, the point at which machine intelligence exceeds human intelligence so decisively and improves so rapidly that the world after it becomes difficult to forecast. Whether one thinks this arrives in one year or twenty, serious people at the frontier are building as though it matters.

And where is Israel in that story?

Israel has excellent researchers, strong engineers, and many startups using AI in meaningful ways. But using AI is not the same thing as shaping the frontier of AI.

Building wrappers, applications, and clever vertical tools around models built elsewhere may produce startups. For now. It does not put a nation on the main line of history and in the long term, any country which builds this way will be irrelevant to the future.

Today, the main line runs through the frontier labs: the organizations building the best general models, the biggest training runs, the deepest compute stacks, and the long-term superintelligence agendas. That is where the compounding advantage is. That is where talent concentrates. That is where the future will get totally decided.

Israel is barely present there. We have Safe Superintelligence, which has offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, co-founded by former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and operates from both locations. It is a real signal that Israel can attract frontier-level AI activity.

But it also proves the deeper point: even this seems less like the result of a coherent Israeli national strategy and more like the byproduct of Jewish talent networks and individual biography.

Israel benefits from deep Jewish involvement in global technology, yet does remarkably little to systematically convert that civilizational advantage into frontier AI leadership.

This is one of the least discussed and most important facts in the entire conversation.

Diaspora Jews, like Israelis, are heavily overrepresented in science, technology, venture capital, and entrepreneurship. In AI specifically, Jews have played major roles across many of the most important institutions shaping the field, principally in shaping front runners like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Oracle and Google.

One does not need to indulge in caricature or imprecision to state the obvious: Jewish talent has been disproportionately present in the making of the AI age.

Israel, as the world’s only Jewish state, is therefore sitting on a strategic goldmine of talent. It has a unique ability to convene, attract, partner with, and anchor part of that global network. And yet it behaves as though this potential is incidental. There is no grand project. No serious national effort to recruit frontier researchers at scale. No bold attempt to make Israel the natural second home of the people building the most consequential technology in human history. What happens instead is mostly accidental, by virtue of Israel’s Jewish character and not by leveraging it in any way.

The thought remains that this will all sort itself out because Israel is the world leader in cybersecurity. That is especially dangerous because the old cyber analogy is actively misleading.

Cybersecurity succeeded in part because Israel developed elite talent pipelines, threat-centric expertise, and a startup ecosystem well suited to a fragmented problem space. Thousands of attack surfaces, endless organizational pain points, highly specialized customer needs, and persistent adversarial pressure created room for full ecosystem of startups with a gradual financial return that could feed into itself.

AI does not work that way. The best systems will swallow product categories. What looks like a great startup niche today becomes a Claude feature tomorrow. What looks like a defendable application layer today becomes an integrated capability of the $20/mo ChatGPT Plus subscription. The frontier labs will consume every vertical, none are safe.

That is why “innovation at the margins” is not enough. If Israel is not on the track of frontier AI, it risks becoming a nation of downstream adaptors in a world increasingly ruled by upstream intelligence producers.

That would be a historic failure of strategic imagination.

Israel does not need to outspend the United States or China dollar for dollar. But it does need to choose. It needs a coherent strategy centered not on “AI for cyber” or “AI for health” or “AI for government efficiency,” but on frontier AI itself.

That means attracting world-class researchers. Building serious compute access. Creating immigration and incentive structures or even just for tours of duty. Backing a small number of organizations capable of operating at the frontier rather than spreading resources thinly across fashionable mediocrity. Treating frontier AI as critical national infrastructure.

It also means understanding the timeline. This is not a sector that will wait patiently for innovation theater. AI progress is compounding. The gap between leaders and followers can widen nonlinearly. A country that misses one technological wave can recover, especially one as talented as Israel. A country that misses the intelligence wave may find that it will have no role in the future.

Israel still has enormous assets. It has talent. It has urgency. It has a culture of improvisation and technical aggression. It has deep military, scientific, and entrepreneurial capital. It has a global Jewish diaspora few countries could dream of possessing. And it has a foothold in the frontier conversation through Safe Superintelligence and AI21.

But these assets will not organize themselves.

The real question is whether Israel understands that AI is not just another industry in which it should compete. It is the industry that will reorder all others. The cyber playbook made Israel successful in the last era. It will not be enough in this one.

If Israel wants to matter in the age of AGI, agents, recursive self-improvement, and eventually superintelligence, it must stop thinking like a country trying to build another strong tech ecosystem.

It must start thinking like a country trying to secure a place at the frontier of history.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)