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How Canada Ended Up As An AI Superpower
pacopico writes: Neural nets and deep learning are all the rage these days, but their rise was anything but sudden. A handful of determined researchers scattered around the globe spent decades developing neural nets while most of their peers thought they were mad. An unusually large number of these academics -- including Geoff Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun and Richard Sutton -- were working at universities in Canada. Bloomberg Businessweek has put together an oral history of how Canada brought them all together, why they kept chasing neural nets in the face of so much failure, and why their ideas suddenly started to take off. There's also a documentary featuring the researchers and Prime Minster Justin Trudeau that tells more of the story and looks at where AI technology is heading -- both the good and the bad. Overall, it's a solid primer for people wanting to know about AI and the weird story of where the technology came from, but might be kinda basic for hardcore AI folks.
And they are a superpower of the word Eh.
when it wasn't profitable on a 5 year timescale like they do here in the states.
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How much of the proceeds go to Canada?
Canada isn't an 'AI superpower'. It's a pleasant storage facility for AI researchers working in the service of the American economy.
Lots of really smart people attracted to doing advanced things in Canada does not result in a product people need later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But its all fun in Canada doing AI until then.
Could it be like the MCM/70 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... with Canada doing pioneering AI work?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Can I download an A.I. program and have it help me with my tasks and issues? It has to be general purpose in nature, and adaptable to a single person's world view point. It has to constructively inform. From what I can see, A.I. is not there, yet.
all these spygate revelations this morning... cant we censor the truth sbout Professor Stefan Halper? Shhhhh!
It is funny to see the industry still trying to flog neural networks. Pathetic.
More money == more taxes == more funding
Canada has an extremely open policy wrt immigration to the point it favours them over native Canadians. Why this matters is we've had a _massive_ flow of them from quite wealthy families especially in Muslim countries (India being one of the larger sources). While the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) is typically on the news it does not reflect Canada. It's what happens when natives flee and you can see it sprawl to places like Waterloo. They came in, bought up everything and have been forcing everyone else out. The money itself comes in large part from guaranteed financial sectors.
TLDR; yes, our Universities rock. But not for reasons you think. Trudeau and Harper sold Canada.
Hi,
I lived in Canada for over 30 years and this isn't exactly the case. Yes they have courses on it at UofT and some great minds have come out of there - but not so fast. Myself and many of my peers in the same area moved to the US simply because lack of work... Now working at Microsoft in the US and giving speeches on ML topics.
Canadian artificial intelligence is no match for American natural stupidity!
But AI? It doesn't exist there anymore than it does here, though they too, have algorithms. It's telling that tech at large equates 'data' with 'smarts', these days. Having a head or a chip full of data or knowledge is not 'intelligence'. Engineers avoid learning the distinction at their own peril, and it won't come from malevolent machines.
This is probably the biggest AI hype in the long running AI hype-->trough-->hype cycle we've had going on since the 50s-60s.
1) the only reason AI and specifically NN are meeting the success they have, such as they are, is brute force. These are the same algos and designs that were around in the 80s and 90s, really, not much "progress" has happenend sionce then however, CPUs have become much more powerful and memory is much bigger and faster and ways of connecting those CPUs together are now well understood and thanks to the internet, theer is a treasure trove of data sutiable to fewed into these designs, for example, VoIP feeding into speech recognition.
2) the "big wins" of AI like world champioinship at Go and Deep Blue in chess are in fields that are dleiberately constructed by humans to flummox human information processing strengths and play to human information processing weaknesses. That's what a game is. Games generally are designed to go beuyond human capabilities in look-ahead- the ability to reason through a long series of if-then-what cycles . We actually have a short horizon for this kind of thing, along with terrible short-term memory. Computers OTOH have astronomical capabilites in these areas. This gives them a preternatural advantage in games.
If Kasparov had the on one billioneth of the look-ahead , reason-ahead ability that Depp Blue do you think he still would have lost? Because I ampretty sure he would be unbeatable.
3) We have zero idea of how the human brains works. Zero. We are at about the same level of understandin our brains as the ancients were when they realized that, hey, the heart... it's a *pump*.....
As an example, to just grab at another field completely randomly, we still dont understand how dust collection cyclones behave as they fine extract particles from swirling air. People get their PhDs studying this, advancing our understanding. Another example. There are organs in the body which have just recently been recognized as organs. Google these things; I am not making them up.
But people like Kurzweil (sp?) want people to believe that we're just about ready to upload our consciousness into a computer. Meanwhile self-criving cars are on the road and actually, we havce zero idea how thye do what they do. what their actual representation , if you cna call it that, of what they see, if you can call it that, is. So of course they're killing people. Of course they are. But hey, we're the species who ignited an atomic bomb not yet certain in the knowledge that it wouldn't ignite the entire atomsphere, so hey, what did you expect.
AI as it is now isn't bullshit, but it's not anythwere near HAL-9000 level AI and it's so far away from it we can't even see the road to it. Everything from the computers it's based on to our understanding of basic physics will have to improve 1000 fold before we're anywhere near where the hype-money-machine says we are now.
You can also thank the stupid breathless media who take everything their told at face value for contributing to this current mass dleusion.
NASA actually put american men on the moon, onboard a canadian-designed spaceship, propelled by a german-designed rocket.
Look at all the butthurt little american snowflakes flooding this thread, either trying to downplay the role of Canada in AI compared to the U.S. or claiming shamelessly and proudly that americans acted like parasites while profiting from the work made by others.
Self driving cars are partially a form of game, well defined roads, rules of the road etc... yes ppl are advancing nn understanding but the recent boom is due to cpus, gpus and the available corpus of well pruned input from the internet.
Re brain, actually my degree is in cog sci w emphasis on brain and computation so I know what I am talking about. Re individual neurons vs integration, see recent advances in using low freq. Light to see neural activity in real time.
Still, we have zero idea how it all works and nothing, even in sci do, about how you get consciousness from electrical chemical signals... but here see recent theorizing yhat consciousness IS what the basic stuff of the universe is..sorry on the move and links not available... hth
Re reinventing intelligence, this is Rodney Brooks and his heirs' approach but at the level of say insects is it intelligence or automata. Reinventing intelligence imo means starting lower, applying evolution, and seeing what evolves.. this is somewhere between chemistry and biology..biochem... imo things designed much above this level are purpose built machines..not different from a calculator.
Aristotle thought calculating , the ability to do math, proved men had not just intelligence but souls. Today, .people think winning at Go means AI is imminent ... this is largely because the AI used to win at Go is a black box and AI is unconsciously defined by society and researchers alike as whatever clever thing a machine does that we don't understand.
Even in sci-fi that was...lol
You sound bitter pancake head. Eh?
By not having PS. (Political Stupidity)
Aye. Well, actually Nay, but you set me up there.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Do you want polite Terminators? Because this is how you get polite Terminators.
until you get them going about either not speaking French or speaking French, they hassle you about the alcoholic beverages and sausages in a cooler buried under camping gear, go on-and-on about how much nicer Toronto is than any U.S. city, torture you to boredom with endless gossip about ice dancers or hockey players, and warn you "I'll be back" with the speech accent of Jordan Peterson before they crash a Bombardier Ski-Doo through the glass doors?
AI, eh?