Google Brain Toronto

https://canada.googleblog.com/2017/03/canadas-ai-moment.html

by lebek • 9 years ago

186 66 9 years ago

canada.googleblog.com

astrodust2• 9 years ago

Ouch, sorry Waterloo.

AdamSC1• 9 years ago

Right? This is an odd choice. Google just built their massive new campus in Waterloo, and University of Waterloo is one of the best engineer schools and computer science schools in the world, but they build this an hour away in a market that is much more expensive? An odd choice for sure.

unavoidable• 9 years ago

Geoff Hinton has deep roots with the rival University of Toronto and the surrounding ecosystem. His role and influence undoubtedly played a large part in this decision.

goodJobWalrus• 9 years ago

Right? This is an odd choice.

Why? UofT / Hinton are doing the AI here...

kitcar• 9 years ago

It's part research center, part marketing expense...

karpathy• 9 years ago

I wasn't too surprised. If you look at the Vector Institute website (http://vectorinstitute.ai/#people), you'll see many additional well-known researchers involved, in addition to Geoff Hinton:

David Duvenaud, Sanja Fidler, Brendan Frey, Roger Grosse, Geoffrey Hinton, Jordan Jacobs, Tomi Poutanen, Daniel Roy, Raquel Urtasun, Richard Zemel.

there is a lot more momentum at UofT in this specific area of research, more than there is at Waterloo.

anthonyc51• 9 years ago

Waterloo is good at churning out entry-level software engineers. UofT is much stronger for ML and research in general.

rand_r• 9 years ago

From the perspective of someone who's lived in both cities, it makes perfect sense. Toronto is a much much nicer place to live and it'll be way easier to attract talent to it. I wouldn't move back to Waterloo for any amount of money.

JabavuAdams• 9 years ago

Few people want to live in Waterloo when they could live in Toronto instead.

mhkhung• 9 years ago

UofT is one of the best research university in the world, at the PhD level.

Waterloo is best at producing the best engineers at the undergrad level.

FT_intern• 9 years ago

Waterloo is best at bleeding great Canadian engineers to the USA

mooneater• 9 years ago

Well Pearl Sullivan is a director (Dean of Engineering at UWaterloo)

lazyant• 9 years ago

There are three sponsor companies from Waterloo (granted, not the big ones) so not ruling out something in Waterloo

itchyjunk3• 9 years ago

I am seeing a lot of investments and MASSIVE promised commitments by a lot of people/company. Is all this money going towards paying experts/ buying equipments ? Don't get me wrong, I like seeing all this money being poured in. It's just that i'm curious as to how this money is being used.

Tangentially, do you think any of this will trickle down to people who are trying to learn math/ML in the form of scholarships?

cicero193• 9 years ago

I agree. It has all been quite vague. I wonder if any will go towards AI based startups.

designium• 9 years ago

Salaries.

itchyjunk3• 9 years ago

Well, I know ycombinator is doing it.[0]

https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-ai/

FreedomToCreate• 9 years ago

The phrasing "Canada's AI Moment" to me implies that this is temporary.

dgudkov• 9 years ago

What [in technology] is not temporary?

NateyJay• 9 years ago

It's a really strange phrase. Maybe meant to be "Movement"?

backpropaganda• 9 years ago

The influx is temporary, is probably what was meant by the phrase. When AI becomes as ubiquitous as, say, the internet, noone would call it AI.

ape4• 9 years ago

Canada will benefit from the brain wall Trump has erected.

dukeluke3• 9 years ago

Those jobs would have been shipped to India eventually anyway. Global corporations don't care about silly things like stable economies. They care about the bottom line.

Edit: to those downvoting me, can you please explain why? Am I wrong in some way?

tachyonbeam• 9 years ago

India doesn't have top universities and top research talent.

FullMtlAlcoholc2• 9 years ago

Just speculating, but positions in AI are usually filled by people with PhD's and this knowledge is so scarce in the job market, not low level IT pros who are competing in a race to the bottom

eigenvector3• 9 years ago

1. What is the Vector Institute? Is a foundation? Is it a not-for-profit corporation? Something else?

2. Who controls it? The government (which has put in most of the announced funding)? The University of Toronto? Google? A combination of all of those?

3. Who will own the work created by the Institute? How will it be licensed, and what rules will govern its publication?

These are questions that would be answered at a very early stage of an ordinary research partnership between a public university and a corporation, but I can find none of these details about Vector.

itchyjunk3• 9 years ago

Also, this is meant to retain talents in Canada rather than coming to USA to work for companies like Google. By working for Google in Canada? Doesn't having "Google Brain" in Canada imply people are working for Google but it's one based in Canada now?

canistr2• 9 years ago

#3 bothers me a lot. It reminds me of the way owners of sports franchises use public tax-payer money to pay for stadiums, meanwhile keeping all the profits from the money made by their teams.

If the various governments in Canada are funding this research and Google is contributing such a minor amount of funding, who is the beneficiary of the research output? Does Google get first dibs on all the information? Does the research ultimately find its most valuable commercial use at Google? Who else stands to benefit from this research? Are any of these beneficiaries going to directly be Canadians? Or are Canadians merely going to be tertiary benefactors with the primary ones being the researchers working in Toronto taking salaries?

tjpoutanen• 9 years ago

Google is one of 11 companies (the platinum level sponsors) that committed $5M to Vector. It's not a Google thing.

The researchers are Vector are free to pursue their own interests, and publish their work like any other academic. Their output is not owned by Google or any of the corporate sponsors.

eigenvector3• 9 years ago

In another comment someone posted the link to Vector's website (which I couldn't find linked from any of the announcements, nor by searching on Google), which clarifies #1 and #2.

http://vectorinstitute.ai/

Vector is organized as a not-for-profit corporation. It has 12 directors including some academics, some big names from corporate Canada, two VCs, a few entrepreneurs, and a few people with close ties to the Ontario government.

The directors are:

Ed Clark - former bank CEO, Ontario government economic advisor

Scott Bonham - VC

Vivek Goel - senior administrator at U of T

Mary Jo Haddad - management consultant specializing in healthcare

Chaviva Hosek - U of T public policy professor, former Canadian government advisor

Jordan Jacobs - lawyer and founder of an AI company

Stephen Lake - engineer and founder

Nadir Mohamed - former Big 3 telecom CEO, associated with Ryerson University

Michael Serbinis - scientist and founder

Pearl Sullivan - Dean of Engineering at UWaterloo

Terrence Sullivan - healthcare policy professor at U of T, closely tied to the Ontario government

Shivon Zilis - VC

throwayedidqo• 9 years ago

Vector seems to be some kind of hybrid entity, presumably designed to soak up ML talent at the University that revived AI research while also soaking up taxpayer dollars for Google.

Added bonus of making Trump look bad by doing cool stuff in USA's backyard instead of the valley.

t3io• 9 years ago

Soo much money being thrown behind a methodology/philosophy that is potentially on its last legs....

So many bets being placed on gift horses hoping for a high return. So little efforts looking and/or thinking beyond a narrow box.

So much disruption potential outside of mainstream currents.

And to think.. All one needs is a computer and an idea.

What unfolds in the times ahead is going to be one for the history books.

nebabyte• 9 years ago

Literally almost everything that happens, and everything in the past few decades of tech anyways, is "one for the history books"

History books contain a lot of inane details no one besides readers of history books are ever charged with knowing. (Then there's the important big-picture stuff and sub-arcs that we're supposed to remember lest we repeat them, but most people have already stopped caring by that point because of the inane details)

etiam• 9 years ago

"Posted by Geoffrey Hinton" it may be, but "authored by Geoffrey Hinton" if there's any truth to it at all must surely be true only in the most superficial and technical sense. With all the marketing speak in that piece it's completely alien to Hinton and very much in line with coming out of some corporate spin department.

Looking beyond the presentation though, I find this an interesting and important development for the field. I'm inclined to think there are plenty of valuable researchers who will work for the vector institute in Toronto who would not have gone to work for Google Brain in the SF Bay area.

Google Brain Toronto

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