How Canada Ended Up As An AI Superpower 64
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.
Re:It’s because they prounce AI as Eh. (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, you mean Eh Aye, eh?
Re:It's because they pronounce AI as Eh. (Score:2, Redundant)
Aye. Well, actually Nay, but you set me up there.
Probably because they didn't just cut funding (Score:3)
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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.
Just like Canada did Avro Arrow? (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
But its all fun in Canada doing AI until then.
Could it be like the MCM/70 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] with Canada doing pioneering AI work?
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NASA actually put american men on the moon, onboard a wildling-designed spaceship, propelled by a nazi-designed rocket.
Well yeah, the US has well been known as the beneficiary of brain drains for a very long time now. This is not news at all. Wernher Von Braun's team of rocket scientists, and Avro's top engineers inclusive. Why be a wildling when going south of the wall gives you a much larger selection of companies to work for (and better weather...why would you want to live in a frozen wasteland? You already know most of them would prefer to be south, given 95% of the wildlings live within 150 miles of the wall.) Each of
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Yes, America pressured Canada to drop the Arrow, that way getting a bunch of engineers to work with their Germans to build Apollo and also so they can forever bitch about Canada not doing enough for defence. Same thing happened earlier with nukes.
Is A.I. Ready for Prime Time? (Score:1)
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Sure I can.
I just need to redefine the word "planet" to "city".
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Neural networks (Score:2)
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"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!
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[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: [wikipedia.org]
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.
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Y'houser!
Sorry.
Re: One word, immigration (Score:3)
You're an idiot.
No so fast (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
So what, eh? (Score:1)
Canadian artificial intelligence is no match for American natural stupidity!
They took off because CPUs became more powerful (Score:1)
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 un
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You started off good AC, but then you seemed to have gone of into the I just think rather then I know category.
Yes the hardware is cheaper and GPUs are more powerful, but the math in NNs and CNNs and all that and the levels that you have in them could never have been done before.
There are many more people studying NN's now than ever, so we can try many more things.
It's not all about Big data and just processing your shopping habits, there is some real work going on in making these systems recognize the worl
Canadian SkyNet (Score:2)
Do you want polite Terminators? Because this is how you get polite Terminators.
The Terminator androids only seem polite (Score:2)
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?
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Sorry.
So its .. (Score:2)