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How Canada Ended Up As An AI Superpower

Posted by BeauHD on from the straight-from-the-source dept.

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.

2 of 64 comments (clear)

  1. One word, immigration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    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.

    1. Re:One word, immigration by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

      DIdn't really get into the details above but you have that backward. Creating the housing crisis is one of the ways Trudeau and Harper sold out Canada. Banks would not lend to locals, but foregners have no problem. Hell you can be fresh of the plane, they don't care, likely because they're more affraid of the PR nightmare around "islamaphobia" and other discrimination aqusations. White people though? Open season.

      Watch / listen to CBC some time, they're the alt-left of Canada. Publicly funded too.

      Even then, the hosuing crisis is being furthered not solved since many of those buildings are not being bought by locals but foreigners to flip / rent. There are a couple families in Ontario for example that own many highrises but rent largely to immigrants. I've lived in several. It's really not uncommon to have the top two floors entirely dedicated to Muslim families, Mosque, daycare, etc. You couldn't get away with that under any other denomination.