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.

Comments

Probably because they didn't just cut funding

[rsilvergun]

when it wasn't profitable on a 5 year timescale like they do here in the states.

Just like Canada did Avro Arrow?

[AHuxley]

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?

Re:How many large Canadian AI companies are there?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, Yann LeCun never went to Canada long term. He was at NYU and now is at Facebook heading up their AI division. Hinton is split between Google and UOFT. The headline and summary are a bit overblown.

Re:One word, immigration

[Ichijo]

"Forcing everyone out" is what happens when you tried so hard to keep out foreigners by restricting new housing and now there isn't enough housing for both the current residents and the newcomers. In other words, you did it to yourself!

Re: One word, immigration

[SirSlud]

You're an idiot.

No so fast

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It’s because they prounce AI as Eh.

[DontBeAMoran]

Oh, you mean Eh Aye, eh?

Re:One word, immigration

[goose-incarnated]

[snipped complaints about laws not being enforced against Muslims]

it's filled with laws that limit

Yeah, and laws that target rape didn't get enforced when it was muslims breaking them:

A neighbour had called the police after hearing the [13 year old] girl scream. The girl was arrested for being drunk and disorderly, but the [muslim] men were not questioned

ecause most of the perpetrators were of Pakistani heritage, several council staff described themselves as being nervous about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others, the report noted, "remembered clear direction from their managers" not to make such identification.

There's more, you can read all about it.

Like you said, "Nice try" ... but your assertion that this could not be happening because there were laws against it is clearly stupid, and you should feel stupid for making that assertion.