“The Technion is the top engineering school in Israel, and I wanted to get the best education I could,” he says. “The academic staff are engaging in incredible, groundbreaking research, and it’s a privilege to work with Israel’s brightest.”
His highest ambition is to create “General Artificial Intelligence,” a type of artificial intelligence that is not bound to a specific domain (like text or vision) but can reason across all the domains humans can. For this vision to be attainable, the learning capacity of artificial intelligence needs to be much faster, and therefore Ofek’s research aims to find ways to accelerate artificial intelligence learning. He is working on a learning framework that leverages Large Language Models and Visual Language Models – advanced AI systems such as ChatGPT that can already perform reasoning – to accelerate learning in robotic domains.
October 7 and the events that followed changed the course of his life. “For the first time in my life, I felt like I could understand how the Holocaust could happen — by seeing the brutality of Israel’s enemies and the spread of antisemitism in the world,” he notes.
Ofek was moved by these atrocities to take action. He enrolled in the StandWithUs Fellowship program to engage in public diplomacy for Israel. He provided educational seminars to youth from the Druze and Jewish communities in Haifa to emphasize coexistence and teach students how to spread positive messages about Israel, peace, and coexistence through social media.
“Northern Israel has always been my home, and now the Technion feels like home, too,” he says. “My home has been under constant threat since October 7, but I’ll continue to tell our story and do everything in my power to protect and defend my friends and family, including my Technion family.”
Ofek was born in Haifa and raised in Yokne’am. When he is not studying or volunteering, he enjoys tennis (a sport he’s been passionate about since he was 11 and holds a coaching certificate in) and woodworking. An animal lover, he once fostered a Labrador retriever training to become a certified seeing-eye dog. After completing his studies, he hopes to broaden his horizons by spending a few years in the United States.
