10 ms·

Montreal Is Leading the AI World Takeover

155 points by myth_drannon 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ajkjk 10y ago
Cloudraker is based in Montreal, unsurprisingly.
Apane 10y ago
Very cool.
dsjoerg 10y ago
No aspiring or self-respecting AI researcher could take an article like this at face value. "The largest concentration of independent AI researchers in the world"? Citation needed. Better yet, data.
- mablap 10y ago
  Here's one data point: There are about 150 academic AI researchers in in an area of 1.4 square kilometre radius in downtown Montreal.
  - nopinsight 10y ago
    That's quite impressive. If you go by sheer numer in a city, Pittsburgh could have more because of Carnegie Mellon, affiliated institutes, Uber research center, and startups stemming from them. The number of AI researchers in the Bay area might be even larger. Many researchers associated with large companies publish papers at a rate comparable to academics. Boston, Redmond, and Beijing are some other contenders. Edit: Researchers in large company and institutions are not 'independent' so not included in their quote above. So yes, technically the article could be right, but it should not matter much whether the researchers work as part of an institution as long as their work is publicly published.
    - mablap 10y ago
      If you have some free time ( ;) ) I would be very interested in seeing a proper ranking. Maybe they're limiting themselves to "Deep Learning AI" when they say Montreal has one of the biggest concentrations of researchers in the world.
      - nopinsight 10y ago
        I guess you are right regarding Deep Learning. Even then, it might be hard to beat the Bay Area. Unfortunately it would take a lot of work to do a proper ranking (and many companies might not make the info public). Maybe we need a better AI for that. ;)
        jay-saint 10y ago
        If you strictly looked at published papers on the subject matter and looked at the location of the authors you could do this relatively simple.
  - edblarney 10y ago
    Montreal has more students/capita than anywhere in North America, due to a clustering of big Unis downtown. So, in a way, it has a 'geography' advantage to such numbers :). That said, I'm highly doubtful that they will be able to effectively leverage the knowledge. Bombardier etc. are slow, monolithic entities, who will no doubt take AI up, but I wonder how effectively and profitably for local entities. Air Canada is an airline operator - much like Verizon etc. - they 'operate' they don't 'innovate'. On the startup side, Montreal is weak - no as bad as other places unknown for startups (say, Houston?), but it does not have the 'acquiring entities' to take up the funnel. Toronto has this disadvantage as well, but because it's bigger, English, and a little more well-known, I think it's less of a problem. The language issue cannot be overlooked - a little less than 1/2 of Montreal is primarily English speaking, and though basically every Francophone speaks English, it does affect how networks are oriented. Francophone networks are weak. They are very local, and poor, and for a variety of reasons a little 'self oriented'. This is a Quebec thing, but also a French thing, and naturally a thing that happens when you're an enclave of people speaking something other than English in North America. Finally - there is a lack of industrial spirit in Montreal. They are academically, socially and creatively inclined, but they don't want to build 'products and services' and aren't keen on making 'big bucks'. The series of 'big business' magnates that came up in Quebec over the last 40 years have been mostly locally oriented: taking up TV/Media, Energy and retail banking sectors during the 'quiet revolution'. The big 'startup' here is a Circus! In my very Francophone neighbourhood, 100% of the waiters and waitresses will tell you they are 'in school' or 'actors' or 'photographers' - yet many of them are late 20's early 30's - and it's not exactly hollywood around here. An acquaintance calls herself a 'playwright' and she's written 2 tiny productions for the local theatre with 2 actors each - no props or anything. She's late in her 'career' already. This attitude is due to a bunch of historical factors and it runs deep. I'm not suggesting people can't build great companies here, and surely some will pop up - and there are some natural advantages such as lots of students and ridiculously low cost of living ... but I'm not sure if anything big will come of it. To grow a startup you need all sorts of motivated people with special skills: recruiting, supply chain, sometimes niche stuff like ASICS etc. - I never, ever meet anyone here remotely in that vein. It's a great city, but I'm not sure it will ever be the 'leader' in anything applied or industrious. I predict a few wins here and there.
aryehof 10y ago
Has AI advanced from the 1990s? Or has there been a change in the environment it can be applied to, with the rise of big data, big infrastructure - big everything?
- thedevil 10y ago
  They learned how to train deep nets ten years ago (and are getting better fast as new techniques are invented). As a result, neural nets started taking over. Big Everything is important, but without the new techniques for deep nets, AI would not be so sexy right now.
  - edblarney 10y ago
    This should not be downvoted, he is essentially correct. 'AI' has always been around, but the 'big leap' we've seen recently is entirely due to researchers finally able to make Neural Nets actually work :). 'Deep Learning' really refers to a specific kind of Neural Network. The first application was image recognition. It's also used a lot now in voice recognition - and they're trying to jam it into everything possible. I think it's basically fair to say that at least in 2016 AI pretty much boils down to Deep Learning / Neural Nets to move something more classical along in terms of capability. What 'AI' means changes over time, but I think it's safe to say the renewal and hype is based on the 'big eureka' in Neural Nets and their relevant applications.
    - _delirium 10y ago
      Even that I don't think involved much of a "eureka" moment, but mostly incremental improvements due to the environment changing. A lot of neural-net techniques from the '80s and '90s that didn't work that well at the time, now work well because we have sufficient data and computation power (especially via GPUs) to make them work. There have been improvements as well of course, but they're evolutionary improvements, while the big breakthrough was big data + big compute.
- tossaway322 10y ago
  aryehof asks>"Has AI advanced from the 1990s?" No. But lots of progress in pattern recognition & classification. So whatever AI exists can see better, hear better, speak better. Unfortunately nothing remotely approaching the intelligence of a cat or dog, much less a human being, has appeared except in very limited domains.
raverbashing 10y ago
"Leading" Self-delusions of grandeur of Quebeckers are funny. Too bad they can't attract talent and can't use the ones they attracted there Meanwhile some top experts are in Silicon Valley, some others in London, there's a lot of ML investment in Berlin and other cities Montreal is a great city but gets dragged down by the French Quebec BS
- ThePhysicist 10y ago
  Could you name some DL companies in Berlin please? I'm very interested in this and based here, so I'd love to learn more about interesting projects here. So far my impression was that the "deep tech" scene in Berlin is minuscule compared to e.g. London and SV, and that most companies here work in ad tech and e-commerce (two fields which I have no interest in at all).
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    Sorry, I meant Machine Learning. You're right.
  - technics256 10y ago
    Do you live in Berlin? Am also looking for like minded people. Munich seems to have more to be honest, and has a new ML incubator.
    - danialtz 10y ago
      Do you know the name of the incubator?
    - bogomipz 10y ago
      I know we hear a lot about Berlin being a startup hub but does Munich also have a startup scene? Lovely city.
  - cknd 10y ago
    By pure chance I know one exception to this ad-tech/e-commerce bias in Berlin: I'm at a Berlin-based company[0] working on DL and deep RL for industrial applications (think robots, optimisation and control). [0] micropsi-industries.com/join_us
ryanobjc 10y ago
Air Canada isn't a global company. It's a flag carrier for Canada only. The rest is wishful thinking. Building an industry isn't just top down (all the braggy stuff was about top down), the bottom up stuff is critical and important. Good luck with it. But I feel like while the research might be OK, the commercialization will come out of the bay area anyways. There just isn't enough quality people to do this in Canada.
- mablap 10y ago
  What do you mean by "bottom up" in this context? They mention having a lot of researchers (grunts) and now a brand new startup accelerator. > There just isn't enough quality people to do this in Canada. Do you really believe that would be the cause?
  - rocky1138 10y ago
    I believe he/she means that, while it's important to have quality infrastructure in place (fun locations, decent food, good pipes) to support startups and tech, it's absolutely critical to have a small group of hackers which actually DO things. Otherwise it's just theatre. The jury is still out on whether one comes before the other or vise versa.
KON_Air 10y ago
"X is leading Y" I thought that kind of marketing died in '00s.
builtinbuffalo 10y ago
This isnt as far fetched as one may think. There's a lot of talent in Montreal and great technology has been developed there. There's a lot more entrepreneurs than many assume from their daily interactions. Example: The worlds first visual word processor was developed in Montreal by Stephen Dorsey - well before Gates, Jobs and Woz. He then went on to develop real time fax over IP in the late 80s / early 90s and owns the patent on t38. Steve and his company are still active, developing communications tech that's used worldwide. This is just one example of many I've unexpectedly encountered doing business in the area. Never say never :)
kelvin0 10y ago
I think there are a lot of Intelligent, Educated, Talented and Creative people in Montreal. But that probably can be said of many places across the globe. So the raw materials for successful tech hub are (partially) available. However, the government seems to to the major 'driving' force behind this, just like they are doing with the Video Game industry in the Province, with big subsidies, tax breaks which 'artificially' boosts local studios. Now the future will tell if the artificial injection will create a lasting, self-sustaining tech hub, or will simply evaporate in the next elections (if a different government decides to cut the Business friendly regulations). But if we take the historic example of the local video game studios (there are a TON of studios around town!), there is a big potential for Montreal to become an important AI center. Ex-Gamedev (and Montrealer) ...
- branchless 10y ago
  Media City has been around more than one electoral cycle in Montreal. Also here the govt is selecting the kind of jobs via tax breaks. The USA has tax breaks for Facebook/Amazon and many others, but it's not targeted it's just a catch-all rule of big companies paying no tax. The state in any country creates the environment in which business lives. The idea that the USA is some kind of "natural" environment for business and everything else is synthetic is not something I can agree with.
  - kelvin0 10y ago
    Yes you are right about the subsidies, they have been around for the major part of the last 15-20 years. So chances are, they will continue to be a driving force which no new elected government will want to 'cut' (financially and politically impractical).
m3kw9 10y ago
They will be exported because the capital isn't readily available there to bring these ppl together in one place.
WhitneyLand 10y ago
It's interesting most Americans don't seem to be aware of how much good tech work goes on in Quebec (say kay-bec not kwa-bec). I went a few years to work on SoftImage3D and it was the same with computer graphics, lots of talent and innovation I was not aware of. It may not be the "Silicon Valley of AI" but the point is they are a hotbed. I would recommend it if you have an interest. People are very friendly, tons of good restaurants, night life, and culture. You get a bit of European flavor without leaving the continent. It is advisable to commit to a crash course in French. Yes a lot of people speak english but for a variety of reasons it makes a big difference in what you'll get out of being an expat.
- branchless 10y ago
  Montreal is the nuts. America won't be singing it's praises mainly because it's quite socialist. Good for Bengio for not going into the private sector, where he would have been forced to put his techniques to utterly pointless work like working out which advertisement can best manipulate someone into buying something they don't need/want. Facebook. Let's hope that Montreal can capture the value added by their public investment to re-invest back into schools and also that they can keep a lid on land prices / banker parasitic behaviour which has clearly blighted California. I'd also agree on learning French, I'm not fluent and it pisses me off. Back to Anki.
- joshwcomeau 10y ago
  Nit: Closer to 'kuh-bec' than 'Kay-bec'. (Born and raised in Montreal)
  - WhitneyLand 10y ago
    Thanks for the refinement. Sometimes when I say poutine people think I'm meaning prostitute so I can definitely use the help :).
- scrollaway 10y ago
  I've been considering for a while moving to Montreal to be closer to the US for practical reasons. Any idea how easy that is as a french citizen?
jeffmcmahan 10y ago
"AI is now the technology shaping our world more than ever before." This, the first sentence of the article, does not express a thought. Read it carefully. It's on a par with "More people have been to Russia than I have."
- mac01021 10y ago
  It's not quite that bad. If you make the (ridiculous) assumption that, at any given time, there is exactly one technology that is shaping 5he world more than it ever did before, then the sentence becomes intelligible. Of course, that's not what they meant...
hackerboos 10y ago
I've been thinking about making the move from Toronto to Montreal. Way cheaper rents and the city has better transport than Toronto, but I'm worried that getting by in only English is going to be an issue.
- miguelrochefort 10y ago
  Half the people only speak English.
- 33degrees 10y ago
  It depends; finding work is usually the biggest problem, but it's easier when you work in tech than in other fields. I know several people who done the same but work remotely
- sebnukem2 10y ago
  A lot of people I work with in Montréal only speak English. It's not a big deal because everyone else is bilingual so the communication isn't broken. The main problem is when it comes to finding a job - speaking French and English is usually a core requirement. If you don't, you'll have to compensate.

155 points by myth_drannon 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ajkjk 10y ago

Cloudraker is based in Montreal, unsurprisingly.

Apane 10y ago

Very cool.

dsjoerg 10y ago

No aspiring or self-respecting AI researcher could take an article like this at face value. "The largest concentration of independent AI researchers in the world"? Citation needed. Better yet, data.

mablap 10y ago
Here's one data point: There are about 150 academic AI researchers in in an area of 1.4 square kilometre radius in downtown Montreal.
- nopinsight 10y ago
  That's quite impressive. If you go by sheer numer in a city, Pittsburgh could have more because of Carnegie Mellon, affiliated institutes, Uber research center, and startups stemming from them. The number of AI researchers in the Bay area might be even larger. Many researchers associated with large companies publish papers at a rate comparable to academics. Boston, Redmond, and Beijing are some other contenders. Edit: Researchers in large company and institutions are not 'independent' so not included in their quote above. So yes, technically the article could be right, but it should not matter much whether the researchers work as part of an institution as long as their work is publicly published.
  - mablap 10y ago
    If you have some free time ( ;) ) I would be very interested in seeing a proper ranking. Maybe they're limiting themselves to "Deep Learning AI" when they say Montreal has one of the biggest concentrations of researchers in the world.
    - nopinsight 10y ago
      I guess you are right regarding Deep Learning. Even then, it might be hard to beat the Bay Area. Unfortunately it would take a lot of work to do a proper ranking (and many companies might not make the info public). Maybe we need a better AI for that. ;)
      - jay-saint 10y ago
        If you strictly looked at published papers on the subject matter and looked at the location of the authors you could do this relatively simple.
- edblarney 10y ago
  Montreal has more students/capita than anywhere in North America, due to a clustering of big Unis downtown. So, in a way, it has a 'geography' advantage to such numbers :). That said, I'm highly doubtful that they will be able to effectively leverage the knowledge. Bombardier etc. are slow, monolithic entities, who will no doubt take AI up, but I wonder how effectively and profitably for local entities. Air Canada is an airline operator - much like Verizon etc. - they 'operate' they don't 'innovate'. On the startup side, Montreal is weak - no as bad as other places unknown for startups (say, Houston?), but it does not have the 'acquiring entities' to take up the funnel. Toronto has this disadvantage as well, but because it's bigger, English, and a little more well-known, I think it's less of a problem. The language issue cannot be overlooked - a little less than 1/2 of Montreal is primarily English speaking, and though basically every Francophone speaks English, it does affect how networks are oriented. Francophone networks are weak. They are very local, and poor, and for a variety of reasons a little 'self oriented'. This is a Quebec thing, but also a French thing, and naturally a thing that happens when you're an enclave of people speaking something other than English in North America. Finally - there is a lack of industrial spirit in Montreal. They are academically, socially and creatively inclined, but they don't want to build 'products and services' and aren't keen on making 'big bucks'. The series of 'big business' magnates that came up in Quebec over the last 40 years have been mostly locally oriented: taking up TV/Media, Energy and retail banking sectors during the 'quiet revolution'. The big 'startup' here is a Circus! In my very Francophone neighbourhood, 100% of the waiters and waitresses will tell you they are 'in school' or 'actors' or 'photographers' - yet many of them are late 20's early 30's - and it's not exactly hollywood around here. An acquaintance calls herself a 'playwright' and she's written 2 tiny productions for the local theatre with 2 actors each - no props or anything. She's late in her 'career' already. This attitude is due to a bunch of historical factors and it runs deep. I'm not suggesting people can't build great companies here, and surely some will pop up - and there are some natural advantages such as lots of students and ridiculously low cost of living ... but I'm not sure if anything big will come of it. To grow a startup you need all sorts of motivated people with special skills: recruiting, supply chain, sometimes niche stuff like ASICS etc. - I never, ever meet anyone here remotely in that vein. It's a great city, but I'm not sure it will ever be the 'leader' in anything applied or industrious. I predict a few wins here and there.

aryehof 10y ago

Has AI advanced from the 1990s? Or has there been a change in the environment it can be applied to, with the rise of big data, big infrastructure - big everything?

thedevil 10y ago
They learned how to train deep nets ten years ago (and are getting better fast as new techniques are invented). As a result, neural nets started taking over. Big Everything is important, but without the new techniques for deep nets, AI would not be so sexy right now.
- edblarney 10y ago
  This should not be downvoted, he is essentially correct. 'AI' has always been around, but the 'big leap' we've seen recently is entirely due to researchers finally able to make Neural Nets actually work :). 'Deep Learning' really refers to a specific kind of Neural Network. The first application was image recognition. It's also used a lot now in voice recognition - and they're trying to jam it into everything possible. I think it's basically fair to say that at least in 2016 AI pretty much boils down to Deep Learning / Neural Nets to move something more classical along in terms of capability. What 'AI' means changes over time, but I think it's safe to say the renewal and hype is based on the 'big eureka' in Neural Nets and their relevant applications.
  - _delirium 10y ago
    Even that I don't think involved much of a "eureka" moment, but mostly incremental improvements due to the environment changing. A lot of neural-net techniques from the '80s and '90s that didn't work that well at the time, now work well because we have sufficient data and computation power (especially via GPUs) to make them work. There have been improvements as well of course, but they're evolutionary improvements, while the big breakthrough was big data + big compute.
tossaway322 10y ago
aryehof asks>"Has AI advanced from the 1990s?" No. But lots of progress in pattern recognition & classification. So whatever AI exists can see better, hear better, speak better. Unfortunately nothing remotely approaching the intelligence of a cat or dog, much less a human being, has appeared except in very limited domains.

raverbashing 10y ago

"Leading" Self-delusions of grandeur of Quebeckers are funny. Too bad they can't attract talent and can't use the ones they attracted there Meanwhile some top experts are in Silicon Valley, some others in London, there's a lot of ML investment in Berlin and other cities Montreal is a great city but gets dragged down by the French Quebec BS

ThePhysicist 10y ago
Could you name some DL companies in Berlin please? I'm very interested in this and based here, so I'd love to learn more about interesting projects here. So far my impression was that the "deep tech" scene in Berlin is minuscule compared to e.g. London and SV, and that most companies here work in ad tech and e-commerce (two fields which I have no interest in at all).
- raverbashing 10y ago
  Sorry, I meant Machine Learning. You're right.
- technics256 10y ago
  Do you live in Berlin? Am also looking for like minded people. Munich seems to have more to be honest, and has a new ML incubator.
  - danialtz 10y ago
    Do you know the name of the incubator?
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    I know we hear a lot about Berlin being a startup hub but does Munich also have a startup scene? Lovely city.
- cknd 10y ago
  By pure chance I know one exception to this ad-tech/e-commerce bias in Berlin: I'm at a Berlin-based company[0] working on DL and deep RL for industrial applications (think robots, optimisation and control). [0] micropsi-industries.com/join_us

ryanobjc 10y ago

Air Canada isn't a global company. It's a flag carrier for Canada only. The rest is wishful thinking. Building an industry isn't just top down (all the braggy stuff was about top down), the bottom up stuff is critical and important. Good luck with it. But I feel like while the research might be OK, the commercialization will come out of the bay area anyways. There just isn't enough quality people to do this in Canada.

mablap 10y ago
What do you mean by "bottom up" in this context? They mention having a lot of researchers (grunts) and now a brand new startup accelerator. > There just isn't enough quality people to do this in Canada. Do you really believe that would be the cause?
- rocky1138 10y ago
  I believe he/she means that, while it's important to have quality infrastructure in place (fun locations, decent food, good pipes) to support startups and tech, it's absolutely critical to have a small group of hackers which actually DO things. Otherwise it's just theatre. The jury is still out on whether one comes before the other or vise versa.

KON_Air 10y ago

"X is leading Y" I thought that kind of marketing died in '00s.

builtinbuffalo 10y ago

This isnt as far fetched as one may think. There's a lot of talent in Montreal and great technology has been developed there. There's a lot more entrepreneurs than many assume from their daily interactions. Example: The worlds first visual word processor was developed in Montreal by Stephen Dorsey - well before Gates, Jobs and Woz. He then went on to develop real time fax over IP in the late 80s / early 90s and owns the patent on t38. Steve and his company are still active, developing communications tech that's used worldwide. This is just one example of many I've unexpectedly encountered doing business in the area. Never say never :)

kelvin0 10y ago

I think there are a lot of Intelligent, Educated, Talented and Creative people in Montreal. But that probably can be said of many places across the globe. So the raw materials for successful tech hub are (partially) available. However, the government seems to to the major 'driving' force behind this, just like they are doing with the Video Game industry in the Province, with big subsidies, tax breaks which 'artificially' boosts local studios. Now the future will tell if the artificial injection will create a lasting, self-sustaining tech hub, or will simply evaporate in the next elections (if a different government decides to cut the Business friendly regulations). But if we take the historic example of the local video game studios (there are a TON of studios around town!), there is a big potential for Montreal to become an important AI center. Ex-Gamedev (and Montrealer) ...

branchless 10y ago
Media City has been around more than one electoral cycle in Montreal. Also here the govt is selecting the kind of jobs via tax breaks. The USA has tax breaks for Facebook/Amazon and many others, but it's not targeted it's just a catch-all rule of big companies paying no tax. The state in any country creates the environment in which business lives. The idea that the USA is some kind of "natural" environment for business and everything else is synthetic is not something I can agree with.
- kelvin0 10y ago
  Yes you are right about the subsidies, they have been around for the major part of the last 15-20 years. So chances are, they will continue to be a driving force which no new elected government will want to 'cut' (financially and politically impractical).

m3kw9 10y ago

They will be exported because the capital isn't readily available there to bring these ppl together in one place.

WhitneyLand 10y ago

It's interesting most Americans don't seem to be aware of how much good tech work goes on in Quebec (say kay-bec not kwa-bec). I went a few years to work on SoftImage3D and it was the same with computer graphics, lots of talent and innovation I was not aware of. It may not be the "Silicon Valley of AI" but the point is they are a hotbed. I would recommend it if you have an interest. People are very friendly, tons of good restaurants, night life, and culture. You get a bit of European flavor without leaving the continent. It is advisable to commit to a crash course in French. Yes a lot of people speak english but for a variety of reasons it makes a big difference in what you'll get out of being an expat.

branchless 10y ago
Montreal is the nuts. America won't be singing it's praises mainly because it's quite socialist. Good for Bengio for not going into the private sector, where he would have been forced to put his techniques to utterly pointless work like working out which advertisement can best manipulate someone into buying something they don't need/want. Facebook. Let's hope that Montreal can capture the value added by their public investment to re-invest back into schools and also that they can keep a lid on land prices / banker parasitic behaviour which has clearly blighted California. I'd also agree on learning French, I'm not fluent and it pisses me off. Back to Anki.
joshwcomeau 10y ago
Nit: Closer to 'kuh-bec' than 'Kay-bec'. (Born and raised in Montreal)
- WhitneyLand 10y ago
  Thanks for the refinement. Sometimes when I say poutine people think I'm meaning prostitute so I can definitely use the help :).
scrollaway 10y ago
I've been considering for a while moving to Montreal to be closer to the US for practical reasons. Any idea how easy that is as a french citizen?

jeffmcmahan 10y ago

"AI is now the technology shaping our world more than ever before." This, the first sentence of the article, does not express a thought. Read it carefully. It's on a par with "More people have been to Russia than I have."

mac01021 10y ago
It's not quite that bad. If you make the (ridiculous) assumption that, at any given time, there is exactly one technology that is shaping 5he world more than it ever did before, then the sentence becomes intelligible. Of course, that's not what they meant...

hackerboos 10y ago

I've been thinking about making the move from Toronto to Montreal. Way cheaper rents and the city has better transport than Toronto, but I'm worried that getting by in only English is going to be an issue.

miguelrochefort 10y ago
Half the people only speak English.
33degrees 10y ago
It depends; finding work is usually the biggest problem, but it's easier when you work in tech than in other fields. I know several people who done the same but work remotely
sebnukem2 10y ago
A lot of people I work with in Montréal only speak English. It's not a big deal because everyone else is bilingual so the communication isn't broken. The main problem is when it comes to finding a job - speaking French and English is usually a core requirement. If you don't, you'll have to compensate.