
New institute aims to make Toronto an ‘intellectual centre’ of AI capability - sonabinu
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thestar.com/amp/news/gta/2017/03/28/new-toronto-institute-aims-to-be-worldwide-supplier-of-artificial-intelligence-capability.html
======
fnbr
The problem that I see (as a Canadian) is salaries. I'm not in Toronto but am
in Canada, and I see people with 10 years experience making less than new
grads in SV (without even factoring in the USD/CAD differential). Until that
aligns, I don't think the brain drain will stop.

~~~
vivekd
We may be able to get by with lower salaries than America if Americas
immigration system continues to lag. It's easier for potential AI brains to
immigrate here than the States under the current climate. I do agree that this
is only of limited advantage, but it's something. I feel like because of
structural and tax issues with our society, American style salaries will never
be a thing here. That probably means that we will never be the tech power
house that America is, but I think we can compete pretty effectively with
Europe in getting the brains who, for whatever reason, choose not to go to
America. And hey . . . second best ain't that bad.

~~~
lebek
What are Canada's "structural and tax issues"?

~~~
vivekd
our taxes are much higher meaning people and companies have less disposable
income - more money is in the public sector rather than the private sector.
Structural is the way our society is set up, there are lots of public services
so people rely on that more than on personal savings. We don't have as many
venture capitalists as America, we don't have the same number of startups, the
wealth in our nation is tied up in the hands of a few large corporations
rather than spread out among many businesses.

~~~
soperj
Our taxes aren't that high compared to some states. California's are
definitely higher. Toronto's housing market is stupid though. Would be better
off in Waterloo, or Ottawa

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alphonsegaston
For those who haven't been, Toronto is a really wonderful city. Safe, great
food, and has an awesome art and music scene. Lots of cool cultural events as
well.

If it wasn't so hard to emigrate as an average America, I'd live there in a
heartbeat. They do have a really good working holiday program for people in
Asia and some parts of Europe.

~~~
rwallace
Out of curiosity, what is the difficulty in migrating from the U.S. to Canada?
All we usually hear about is the difficulty in migrating to the U.S.

~~~
alphonsegaston
Canada only allows something like 300,000 long-term residents to move into the
country per year, of which about half those slots are reserved for refugees
and family reunification. They're immigrantion process is just as bureaucratic
as the US (if not slightly more so), and they are very selective about whom
they take (favoring the wealthy, those with advanced higher education, and
French/English bilinguals).

[https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/move-to-
canada...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/09/move-to-canada-trump-
election-immigration)

------
remir
Google is also building an AI research lab in Montreal, which is supposedly a
talent center for AI. According to this article from Wired:
[https://www.wired.com/2016/11/google-opens-montreal-ai-
lab-s...](https://www.wired.com/2016/11/google-opens-montreal-ai-lab-snag-
scarce-global-talent/), Google _" donated about $13 million CAD to academic
research in the country and about half was earmarked for AI research."_

------
canistr
Toronto's problem (and to an extent the other major cities in Canada) isn't so
much about the salary differences with SV so much as the entire tech
ecosystem. The money and cost of living would probably affect decisions for
people outside of the GTA trying to move here. But because Toronto is the
largest city in the country and is the focal point of Southern Ontario, it
could do well by simply retaining the talent it outputs.

The brain drain from the GTA and Southern Ontario has long been real. But
alternatively, many people move from other places to Toronto. What makes it
difficult for new grads and industry veterans from keeping shop in Toronto is
that the mobility and learning experiences aren't there. There are a limited
number of high-tech jobs here and anything else is likely in the medical, law,
finance, or even media world. In that sense, I wouldn't even classify tech as
a second-class citizen so much as being far down on the totem pole.

I partially wonder if the general inferiority complex of
Torontonians/Canadians has created this effect. Because the city typically
lusts for things from other places (such as SV or NY), it never develops its
own reputation and chooses to be itself. Because of that, tech has never
developed an identity because all of our tech talent chooses the shiny
opportunity granted to them by some company because it's "from Silicon
Valley". Just think of what the tech ecosystem would be like if all
Torontonians simply stayed here.

For instance, I often posit what would have happened had the ML/DL community
had stronger partnerships with AMD as opposed to building everything with
CUDA/NVIDIA. AMD, afterall, is just up the street from the University of
Toronto in Markham. A symbiotic relationship could've been built with Hinton's
lab.

~~~
cbsmith
As one of those brains that drained out of Toronto, I would say that "limited
number of spaces" is malarky. You can create the space. What I did find was
that Toronto's investment community (at least a couple of decades ago) was
much more conservative, so it was much harder to create the space in Toronto
than it was south of the border.

~~~
canistr
I think you're overlooking the broader point I'm making by focusing on that
one line. The point is that if Toronto had the same tech ecosystem as to say
even Seattle or New York for salaries ranging between half to two-thirds of
their American counterparts, I'd reasonably certain Canadians would opt to
stay here.

Yes, the investment community has a broader effect on the startups within the
city. But I'm not sure they have as significant of an effect on large tech
companies setting up research or dev centres here. And ultimately, having the
powerhouses here helps to retain talent probably greater than having hundreds
of startups in the $10-50 million revenue range.

~~~
cbsmith
> I think you're overlooking the broader point I'm making by focusing on that
> one line.

Sorry if my comment read that way. I was only critiquing the one line, not the
entire post.

> But I'm not sure they have as significant of an effect on large tech
> companies setting up research or dev centres here. And ultimately, having
> the powerhouses here helps to retain talent probably greater than having
> hundreds of startups in the $10-50 million revenue range.

I think you are getting cause and effect backwards here. In my experience,
there were plenty of tech employers in Toronto, just not for the really
interesting & challenging stuff. For example, IBM has had a very large
presence there for decades, but twenty years ago the coolest software project
they had going on up there was the Visual Age IDE's. Alias Systems was a big
deal back in the day, but even that ended up being bought up and by
Autodesk...

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romuloab42
Non Google-AMP link: [https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/03/28/new-toronto-
inst...](https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/2017/03/28/new-toronto-institute-
aims-to-be-worldwide-supplier-of-artificial-intelligence-capability.html)

~~~
mzzter
the AMP link really masks the original domain wow, thought the article was
written by google for a second :/

~~~
scosman
Not sure why people are downvoting. This is a legit complaint about AMP. Even
the HN homepage is showing this as "google.com", not "thestar.com".

~~~
itchyjunk
I clicked thinking it was a google announcement and got redirected. Didn't
even know what AMP was till i saw this thread and googled it.

------
somberi
Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist at the University of Toronto, is the
great-great-grandson of George Boole, whose Boolean algebra is a keystone of
digital computing—has sometimes been called the father of deep learning; it’s
a topic he’s worked on since the mid-nineteen-seventies, and many of his
students have become principal architects of the field today.

From: [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/ai-versus-
md](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/04/03/ai-versus-md)

------
FreedomToCreate
As someone who lived in Toronto and now lives in SV, this is great news for
the region, which is flush with talent and is really doing everything to
support researchers and entrepreneurs. However the cost of living(COL) is
prohibitive, maybe even more than SV and the ratio of salary to COL is
definitely higher than SV.

~~~
truebosko
I don't think I believe this. Source?

~~~
aheilbut
Housing prices have been rising very rapidly over the last couple of years:
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-03/million-d...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-03/million-
dollar-home-contagion-spreads-to-toronto-suburbs)

~~~
sanswork
House prices are skyrocketing but condos are still pretty cheap. There just
isn't any more space for actual houses in the city so the ones that are there
are extra valuable.

You can still find tons of 1+1 units in the city for under $2000/month which
is the same as it was 3-4 years ago.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
$2k per month is really high. Even if a tech worker can afford that, it really
restricts the city to the rich, which is not good. Every city needs a balance
of all classes for there to be stable growth.

~~~
sanswork
$2k per month for a 1+1 in a 'luxury' condo building right in the core of the
city isn't high by basically any standard. There are a lot of options in the
city still that are a lot cheaper.

I see a lot of people complaining about high prices in the most prime of
areas. So what do you think would be a good solution to the problem? Everyone
wants to live in area X but obviously they can't all fit there. How do you let
them all live there and keep it affordable?

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
I'd argue that the biggest factors creating the spike in housing cost is the
of the centralization of most good jobs to a handful of urban centers, the
purchase of housing by foreign investors as vacation or investment properties,
and an artificially low housing inventory.

The centralization of most jobs to a handful of urban centers is the largest
and most powerful force driving this spike in prices. Jobs are flying out of
rural areas and less populated cities. It increases prices, making it very
difficult for a newcomer to buy in the area, let alone rent. It creates
pockets of areas that reap the benefits of globalization, creating a very
stark contrast between areas that benefit from it and that don't. And all this
is just so that the corporation benefits from the concentrated, highly
technical labor pool.

The foreign investor cap should be easy to implement, but because our
government is broken, it won't happen. There are lots of ways this could be
addressed, with property taxes of unleased housing, taxing of a third home or
beyond, and probably lots of other things smarter people could think of.

The artificially low housing inventory is difficult because that stems from
local government more than anything else. Fixing this might take state laws to
be passed since locals will have an incentive to not have new properties made.

Again, the centralization of the remaining jobs is the biggest factor in my
opinion. It really needs to be addressed since it negatively hurts our
society, but I don't know any other ideas on how to fix it without increasing
demand for lower class labor via protectionism. That would drive companies to
look to rural America for cheap labor vs Mexico or China which would weaken
the requirement to live in an urban center, but obviously that would be very
costly to our economy. If you have any other ideas on how to fix it, I'd
definitely read it.

~~~
sanswork
Do you think Toronto has an artificially low housing inventory? With the
hundreds of 40 story condo towers popping up?

So how do you make the decentralization of jobs more appealing to employers?
Say I own a tech business how do you convince me to move my company to Barrie
for example? I now have the difficulty of finding local talent or convincing
talent to relocate to me or deal with a very long commute. Where is the
benefit for me? Network effects are real.

Besides this Toronto already essentially has a number of business cores that
are distributed. You have the financial district, Young/Eg, Sauga, Markham,
Vaughn and those are just the biggest ones.

None of that reduces demand for the core though because it is the most
appealing place to live for most young people.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
> So how do you make the decentralization of jobs more appealing to employers?

That's the tough thing. The only solution I can think of, protectionism, will
be very rough on employers. The lower and middle classes would thrive, but
corporations that previously had massive profit margins would see those almost
disappear, especially after unions form again.

Obviously this would be very expensive, but I really fear that if we don't do
something, our country will end up politically and socially unstable. A
country with millions of minimum wage workers and a handful of rich-only
cities is bound to have troubles.

As far as Toronto's housing inventory goes, I don't know enough about Toronto
to comment.

~~~
sanswork
What do you mean when you say protectionism?

Like what concrete actions would you take?

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
Global trade has benefits beyond cheap labor. Resource distribution between
nations is not even. Because of that, I'd stop all or most trade with
countries who don't have labor and environmental protection laws similar to
our own, but still allow trade with countries with similar economies. That
would allow the resource flow needed to give a balanced economy, but still
bring manufacturing back. Over time, demand for lower class labor would raise,
leading to higher wages and quality of life for most people.

That's the hope anyway. If you see any blaring flaws beyond the fact that
multinational corporations would suffer, please let me know.

~~~
sanswork
So you stop international trade but why wouldn't the manufacturing just build
up on the edges of the cities? Why do you think that would distribute
naturally throughout the country? The cities have a built in and stable
workforce. Unless there is a natural resource that needs to be extracted from
the area I'm just not seeing it.

Besides with the increase in automation the types of workers factories will
need in the future will be high tech as well.

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
Good question. I don't know. I'll have to look into what caused work to go to
rural towns in the first place.

Thank you for this post. This is exactly the kind of reply I was hoping to
get.

~~~
sanswork
Farming and natural resources generally. Where there was a mine to open or
lumber to chop a town would spring up. Otherwise you'd typically get small
towns springing up in the middle of farming areas. But back then a family
might have 100 or 200 acres so you'd get a lot of people in a fairly small
area. Now with modern tech farms can be 10 times that and corporations
probably own most of them so they don't each have their own family.

Thank you as well. It was a good one for thinking about stuff even if we
disagree on the basic idea. :)

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
I found this a couple of days after our discussion. I found it interesting and
thought you would too.

[http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-
and-...](http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/)

------
mabbo
And yet Google still won't open a local dev office apart from Waterloo (over
an hour away).

~~~
dontreact
[https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/google/research-s...](https://careers.google.com/jobs#!t=jo&jid=/google/research-
scientist-google-brain-canada-111-richmond-st-w-toronto-on-canada-2491730056)

~~~
tjpoutanen
It was announced yesterday that Geoff Hinton will lead a google brain lab in
Toronto.

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Apocryphon
I thought that Montréal was already the AI centre of Canada.

~~~
beerbaron23
Correct, Montréal is already way way ahead of Toronto on the AI front. Google
and Microsoft already invested heavily into Montréal. M$ donated 7 million to
UdeM and McGill as well.

------
JohnJamesRambo
Institute...AI...Fallout

