
Google Brain Toronto - lebek
https://canada.googleblog.com/2017/03/canadas-ai-moment.html
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eigenvector
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.

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canistr
#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?

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tjpoutanen
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.

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itchyjunk
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?

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cicero19
I agree. It has all been quite vague. I wonder if any will go towards AI based
startups.

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

[https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-ai/](https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-ai/)

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ape4
Canada will benefit from the brain wall Trump has erected.

~~~
dukeluke
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?

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

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devdoomari
aren't IITs top univ.s?

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akinalci
Certainly some of them are for undergraduate education, but I'm not sure
they're top research universities.

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astrodust
Ouch, sorry Waterloo.

~~~
AdamSC1
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.

~~~
karpathy
I wasn't too surprised. If you look at the Vector Institute website
([http://vectorinstitute.ai/#people](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.

~~~
astrodust
The University of Toronto is probably a lot better funded than Waterloo, too,
has a massive student base, and has connections to other local universities
that are also much larger than Waterloo like York and Ryerson.

This selection will certainly put a dent in Waterloo's reputation, though with
any luck they'll be able to capitalize on it in some capacity due to their
proximity.

~~~
029r0823jr
> This selection will certainly put a dent in Waterloo's reputation, though
> with any luck they'll be able to capitalize on it in some capacity due to
> their proximity.

Highly doubt it. Waterloo is known for being mediocre/trash for CS research.
People go to Waterloo to get into industry and not academics.

~~~
AvenueIngres
>Waterloo is known for being mediocre/trash for CS research

Are you out of your mind?

Do you know why Waterloo's School of Computer Science is named after David R.
Cheriton?

Yeah, the same DRC who made a major exit to Cisco, seed funded Google and hold
an emeritus professorship at Stanford.

A sizeable chunk of the people who published Spark have done their undergrad'
or research masters at UW.

Waterloo is definitely top-notch at the undergrad', perhaps less impressive
than schools with bigger endowment at the research level, but far from being
"trash". Tons of Waterloo profs are on the steering committees of major CS
conferences (VLDB most notably).

This comment is so puerile, it has to be written by some jealous and petty
undergraduate student. Or so I hope.

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etiam
"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.

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t3io
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.

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nebabyte
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)

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

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dgudkov
What [in technology] is not temporary?

