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When walking around the U of Toronto, I often think that ~10 years ago Ilya was in a lab next to Alex trying to figure things out. I can't believe this new AI w

When walking around the U of Toronto, I often think that ~10 years ago Ilya was in a lab next to Alex trying to figure things out. I can't believe this new AI wave started there. Ilya, Karpathy, Jimmy Ba, and many more were at the right time when Hinton was there too.

izend 2y ago
And none of them build AI companies in Toronto. I’m Canadian and disappointed at how ineffective we are at building successful companies.
- titanomachy 2y ago
  Yeah Canada just spends a ton of taxpayer money to create great institutions like U of T and Waterloo, so that their graduates can all go to Silicon Valley and make 2-3x the money.
  - saithound 2y ago
    Maybe the majority of Canadians think that having great higher education institutions and thr people who work in them is a good fit for their way of life, but having Silicon Valley companies and people making SV salaries around epuld make their lives worse? If so, this is great: Canadians don't want to live with the tech crowd, so they provide them with the skills so they can move elsewhere, make their dreams come tuee, and not bother the majority that don't want their presence. NB some actual Canadians in this thread have voiced this possibility.
    - vasco 2y ago
      That makes zero sense, governments invest in education to improve their own country, not to train other countries work forces. If you read anything about Canada ever you will also know they have a bunch of policies to try and stop the brain drain and to recruit tech workers from abroad.
      - saithound 2y ago
        > That makes zero sense, governments invest in education to improve their own country The idea is precisely that not having SV types around _improves_ the country, i.e. makes it closer to the preferences of Canadians. And yes, having a foreign tech worker doing 9-to-5 in a large legacy company for thoroughly average salaries is very different from having a SV-style startup culture. There is very little process in Canada to make life difficult for the former style of company, and plenty of process to make operations difficult for the latter. If not having SV folk improves Canada for Canadians, and hqving SV folks improves America for Americans, then this is just mutually beneficial trade. Efforts to try and stop brain drain still makes sense: it's even better if you can convince the citizens you trained to engage in the economic activity you actually want instead of economic activity that you find undesirable, but if you're unable to convince most of them, letting them go is still better than having them stay and engage in their undesirable behavior anyway. Compare: if a large minority of Icelanders wanted to work for the Baby (which Iceland doesn't have), theb stopping the brain drain (convincing them to work in the Merchant Fleet) is the best outcome, but funneling them out (training them in merchant navigation and watching them join the Danish Navy) would still be preferable to them engaging in their desired behavior anyway (form their own pirate gang preying on the very Merchant Fleet you're trying to advantage).
        vasco 2y ago
        > And yes, having a foreign tech worker doing 9-to-5 in a large legacy company for thoroughly average salaries is very different from having a SV-style startup culture Immigrants coming into countries start companies at a disproportionate rate compared to natives. Other than unquantifiable statements about what "Canadians want" everything you mentioned so far to justify this idea of "canada doesnt care if tech graduates leave" is falsifiable by data.
        saithound 2y ago
        One last time, the claim is not that "Canada doesn't care". It's that it prefers it to the alternative of SV-style companies operating from Canada. Which is consistent both with data, facts on the ground (yes, Canada has laws and administrative processes designed to make SV-style startups difficult to start there, that's precisely what people complain about above!), and the comments of actual Canadians in this very thread. You're welcome to present data falsifying the actual claim if you think you have it (instead of the "Canada doesn't care" straw man or misunderstanding that you repeat above, noting that so far you have not even refuted your own straw man by presenting any data).
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    > 2-3x the money. That's if you're stuck in tech support. When you start doing actual ground breaking work it starts at x10 and goes up significantly.
    - titanomachy 2y ago
      If you’re a top-tier AI researcher like Ilya, for sure. I was thinking about your run-of-the mill FAANGish senior engineer.
      - llm_trw 2y ago
        E6 in facebook is something like USD 750k total comp. In Canada you'd be lucky to get USD 180k total comp. It really is x5 to x10 for seniour programmers.
  - newzisforsukas 2y ago
    As if the tech economy in the US is unique for some reason
    - MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
      It kind of is?
      - sal_regalier 2y ago
        I think that was the joke.
- nightowl_games 2y ago
  Couldn't a company like that get a huge tax benefit from the SRED program?
  - loopdoend 2y ago
    The amount of paperwork involved makes it unworkable
    - MassiveQuasar 2y ago
      10B$ says you're wrong.
      - llm_trw 2y ago
        10B is going to old mates mates. No new startups are getting it. It's also like pulling teeth trying to explain to people that if we don't offer compensation commensurate with what they get in the US people will just leave for the US. There is some form of brain damage where even people who know how to code assume that because you can get a crud developer for $80k a year you should get an AI researcher for $150,000. It's nearly double after all.
        tbossanova 2y ago
        Compensation isn’t just money. Staying near family and friends is hard to measure. I’ve never moved country for $ alone.
        llm_trw 2y ago
        Great. But anyone good gets offered so much they move eventually. It might not be a year after uni, might not be 10, but eventually they will move because the pay in the US is just so much better than anywhere else.
      - x-complexity 2y ago
        There is a vast underestimation of how tedious & time-intensive these tax credit programs are when applying for them. A large company can do so because they can hire the people to solely go after them; A new startup (with a headcount that can fit in one hand) is too busy in actually keeping the business alive to pursue these programs, which often times come with conditions too arbitrary for startups to fulfill.
- typon 2y ago
  The Canadian Dream is to get a great education and then move of the US. You might want to blame the government or this or that but I think as a Canadian I've finally come to reckon with the fact that it's just not in the Canadian ethos to do risky things like make startups. Of course there are exceptions to the rule but they are very very rare. Canadian investors don't want to take big risks and the Americans are just next door waiting to gobble up the talent in search of capital.
  - eggdaft 2y ago
    For folks without responsibilities like kids, aging parents, etc. I really don’t think startups are very “risky”. What’s the worst that happens? It doesn’t work out and after five years you go get a job in boring corp corp with an incredible skillset and vast life experience. You’ve sacrificed some income perhaps, but so what? People make choices like that all the time. Your working career could easily be 40 or 45 years, 5 is not that much and it’s not like you went bankrupt. Your skillset might even mean you more than make up for lost time. I don’t understand the talk of “risk” unless you’re Elon Musk betting the farm on your businesses and facing bankruptcy. Work in your spare time until you have something Angel worthy, then get a modest salary to get to the next level and on you go. Or just bootstrap. Is it easy? No, it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Is it risky? Not so much. So why do Canadians and Brits see it as a risky thing to do? I think they don’t. What they see is _uncertainty_ - where will I be in six months? What if it doesn’t work out? What if I fail and people judge me? They don’t like uncertainty. That is conservative with a small c. Probably it’s a cultural artefact rather than anything remotely rational. The problem is you end up in an equilibrium where the society is conservative (“what you wanna do wasting your time with that”) so the ambitious people just leave and go to somewhere like (parts of) the US where people want to change things, make things, improve the world. And the conservative society gets more conservative until it is ossified. Startups carry high uncertainty but not high risk.
    - vasco 2y ago
      This depends on what you see as risk. If I can safely earn for 5 years way above national average and build a strong savings egg that can provide income forever. Or I can fail at a startup and be close to zero five years later, the fact that you aren't homeless and starving and can get another job doesn't mean it wasn't risky, you still wasted a bunch of years compared to slow and steady accumulation. I've read the majority of millionaires in the US get created like this, working and saving through decades. You're basically repeating investor kool-aid, because for their model to work, 100 people will fail and 1 succeed, and so they tell you to not worry if you're in the 99.
- langsoul-com 2y ago
  Why would anyone start the game on hard mode when easy mode is a border drive away? Us is so outrageously better than the rest that people fly across oceans to start businesses there. Canada, being next door, doesn't have the distance moat to at least slow down the brain drain
  - threatofrain 2y ago
    With regards to talent, there's no particular reason why software centers couldn't be in any major established city in the world. It's not like it takes billions of dollars on a highly uncertain bet like creating a car company, rocket reuse company, or a CPU company. A small crew of people could potentially build the next WhatsApp. On Erlang.
    - resonious 2y ago
      There are definitely many good programmers all over the world, but there are more in the US, because that's where all the best companies are. So if you're trying to make a good company and you want good programmers, where do you go?
      - OJFord 2y ago
        You stay where you are and hire the ones willing or keen to work remotely?
    - ForHackernews 2y ago
      In the case of AI it absolutely does take billions and billions of dollars on an uncertain bet. They bet that throwing more data, more hardware, more GPU cycles at the problem would yield results and it has.
    - pquki4 2y ago
      Eh, $$$? I know people from "first world" countries like Japan and France that are come to work in the US simply because it pays much more.
    - 2y ago
- crucialfelix 2y ago
  Also: All your comedians move to the US to make it big.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  Canada is addicted to rent seeking, monopoly businesses, corporations that push regulatory capture on the gov't and then parasitize, and -- most of all -- ripping resources out of the ground and selling them cheap, or doing the same with real estate. My latest annoyance is all the moaning and groaning about the latest capital gains tax increase. People complaining on one hand about how the Canadian economy lacks productivity, and then screaming to high heaven about tax policy that mostly only impacts people making quick speculative cash. Investment takes no risks in this country because they don't have to. They just dump money into real estate or oil & gas instead and then hang at the lake in the Muskokas.
- raverbashing 2y ago
  As much as people on this site like to complain about Europe (and a lot of it is merited) - I've found that Canada manages to be worse. Even having lower on avg bureaucracy
- swat535 2y ago
  As another Canadian, I feel the same but I'm not surprised one bit. Canada is actively hostile towards tech and suffers from crippling salaries and investments. The idea of "business" in this country is buying a house and renting its basement. Our government's incompetence is comical, we are nothing but more than a tech talent / immigration proxy for United States at this point.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    I don't know, Canada and every-other-country-that's-not-the-US. When there's a neighbor that is flush with cash, where make-or-break is a kind of national disease ... what can you do? (I'm an American, FWIW.)
    - mdorazio 2y ago
      FWIW, Israel and China are the other two hotspots for building startups. It’s worth looking at how Israel did it since their model could work elsewhere. For example they have a government funded delegation that goes around to conferences solely to meet with large companies and investors and promote Israeli startups.
  - drdrek 2y ago
    Its a mix of "Easy" things to fix: Streamline tax code, build desirable office centers, Have good internet infrastructure and "Hard" Things: The work culture, Cost of living
- sonofaragorn 2y ago
  Aidan Gomez, Nick Frost, and Ivan Zhang, all of whom were Hinton's students at UofT started Cohere (https://cohere.com/about https://cohere.com/about)
- boringg 2y ago
  I've thought about this one for a long time having lived in both SV and Canada. It is a complicated one but there are a handful of critical road blocks in Canada that make it more challenging. (1) Access to size of market even if online being US vs 'foreign' has advantages in political arena/regulatory benefits (2) Significant tax advantages for US investors vs limited tax advantages for Canada (Angel+VC) (3) Risk Appetite (impacted by size of market) - compounded by tax disadvantages (why would you take risk if your lining the pockets of the government?) (4) Bench depth on talent once you really start to scale your company (5) CAD strength (double edged sword) - talent goes South for better salaries (+ you need to compete), if the company revenue is in USD and employees are paid in CAD (6) Start-ups paying in equity, early employees taking on that risk actually will get taxed heavily under new cap gains so the incentive to work hard for money is lower. (7) Network effects of being in the valley - idea percolation, new playbooks, talent, competitiveness, company fitness I will add that in this very specific AI case there is limited way you are going to find the depth of talent and capital in the country to make that company fly at the scale it needs to be.
  - jpalawaga 2y ago
    if the idea that high taxes disincentivizes people from building stuff, california would be a wasteland. but that's not what we see. people build because they still have a chance a making a lot of money. also, like canada can build successfully tech companies. yes, I realize there should be more canadian tech darlings, but I don't think it has to do with high taxes so much as it has to do with Canadians being comfortable and not feeling the need to sacrifice everything to try and build the biggest thing. If you look at Canada's most successful tech companies, the founders usually sell and enjoy a more comfortable existence.
    - somebodythere 2y ago
      California benefits from a dominant market position. If you have the choice to found where the investors and the talent are, why would you pick Canada when the tax is the same?
    - lesuorac 2y ago
chollida1 2y ago
Oh man that was an amazing time at UoT. We also got GPU versions of btc mining from that group. We also had Ethereum be born right around there as well around 2014. I remember the first Ethereum meetups around Queen and Spadina with Vitalik. But to another posters point. Even though we had the father of deep learning Geoffrey Hinton and lumiaries like Ilya, and Vitalik, we didn't manage to get any real benefit from that.
- snowbyte 2y ago
  Wow! By the time I arrived, Hinton was gone. As well as many great professors that started their own companies or were poached by big players (i.e. Sanja-Nvidia). At least I got to learn NN from Jimmy Ba (author of Adam). Now, he's working at xAI.

izend 2y ago

And none of them build AI companies in Toronto. I’m Canadian and disappointed at how ineffective we are at building successful companies.

titanomachy 2y ago
Yeah Canada just spends a ton of taxpayer money to create great institutions like U of T and Waterloo, so that their graduates can all go to Silicon Valley and make 2-3x the money.
- saithound 2y ago
  Maybe the majority of Canadians think that having great higher education institutions and thr people who work in them is a good fit for their way of life, but having Silicon Valley companies and people making SV salaries around epuld make their lives worse? If so, this is great: Canadians don't want to live with the tech crowd, so they provide them with the skills so they can move elsewhere, make their dreams come tuee, and not bother the majority that don't want their presence. NB some actual Canadians in this thread have voiced this possibility.
  - vasco 2y ago
    That makes zero sense, governments invest in education to improve their own country, not to train other countries work forces. If you read anything about Canada ever you will also know they have a bunch of policies to try and stop the brain drain and to recruit tech workers from abroad.
    - saithound 2y ago
      > That makes zero sense, governments invest in education to improve their own country The idea is precisely that not having SV types around _improves_ the country, i.e. makes it closer to the preferences of Canadians. And yes, having a foreign tech worker doing 9-to-5 in a large legacy company for thoroughly average salaries is very different from having a SV-style startup culture. There is very little process in Canada to make life difficult for the former style of company, and plenty of process to make operations difficult for the latter. If not having SV folk improves Canada for Canadians, and hqving SV folks improves America for Americans, then this is just mutually beneficial trade. Efforts to try and stop brain drain still makes sense: it's even better if you can convince the citizens you trained to engage in the economic activity you actually want instead of economic activity that you find undesirable, but if you're unable to convince most of them, letting them go is still better than having them stay and engage in their undesirable behavior anyway. Compare: if a large minority of Icelanders wanted to work for the Baby (which Iceland doesn't have), theb stopping the brain drain (convincing them to work in the Merchant Fleet) is the best outcome, but funneling them out (training them in merchant navigation and watching them join the Danish Navy) would still be preferable to them engaging in their desired behavior anyway (form their own pirate gang preying on the very Merchant Fleet you're trying to advantage).
      - vasco 2y ago
        > And yes, having a foreign tech worker doing 9-to-5 in a large legacy company for thoroughly average salaries is very different from having a SV-style startup culture Immigrants coming into countries start companies at a disproportionate rate compared to natives. Other than unquantifiable statements about what "Canadians want" everything you mentioned so far to justify this idea of "canada doesnt care if tech graduates leave" is falsifiable by data.
        saithound 2y ago
        One last time, the claim is not that "Canada doesn't care". It's that it prefers it to the alternative of SV-style companies operating from Canada. Which is consistent both with data, facts on the ground (yes, Canada has laws and administrative processes designed to make SV-style startups difficult to start there, that's precisely what people complain about above!), and the comments of actual Canadians in this very thread. You're welcome to present data falsifying the actual claim if you think you have it (instead of the "Canada doesn't care" straw man or misunderstanding that you repeat above, noting that so far you have not even refuted your own straw man by presenting any data).
- llm_trw 2y ago
  > 2-3x the money. That's if you're stuck in tech support. When you start doing actual ground breaking work it starts at x10 and goes up significantly.
  - titanomachy 2y ago
    If you’re a top-tier AI researcher like Ilya, for sure. I was thinking about your run-of-the mill FAANGish senior engineer.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      E6 in facebook is something like USD 750k total comp. In Canada you'd be lucky to get USD 180k total comp. It really is x5 to x10 for seniour programmers.
- newzisforsukas 2y ago
  As if the tech economy in the US is unique for some reason
  - MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
    It kind of is?
    - sal_regalier 2y ago
      I think that was the joke.
nightowl_games 2y ago
Couldn't a company like that get a huge tax benefit from the SRED program?
- loopdoend 2y ago
  The amount of paperwork involved makes it unworkable
  - MassiveQuasar 2y ago
    10B$ says you're wrong.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      10B is going to old mates mates. No new startups are getting it. It's also like pulling teeth trying to explain to people that if we don't offer compensation commensurate with what they get in the US people will just leave for the US. There is some form of brain damage where even people who know how to code assume that because you can get a crud developer for $80k a year you should get an AI researcher for $150,000. It's nearly double after all.
      - tbossanova 2y ago
        Compensation isn’t just money. Staying near family and friends is hard to measure. I’ve never moved country for $ alone.
        llm_trw 2y ago
        Great. But anyone good gets offered so much they move eventually. It might not be a year after uni, might not be 10, but eventually they will move because the pay in the US is just so much better than anywhere else.
    - x-complexity 2y ago
      There is a vast underestimation of how tedious & time-intensive these tax credit programs are when applying for them. A large company can do so because they can hire the people to solely go after them; A new startup (with a headcount that can fit in one hand) is too busy in actually keeping the business alive to pursue these programs, which often times come with conditions too arbitrary for startups to fulfill.
typon 2y ago
The Canadian Dream is to get a great education and then move of the US. You might want to blame the government or this or that but I think as a Canadian I've finally come to reckon with the fact that it's just not in the Canadian ethos to do risky things like make startups. Of course there are exceptions to the rule but they are very very rare. Canadian investors don't want to take big risks and the Americans are just next door waiting to gobble up the talent in search of capital.
- eggdaft 2y ago
  For folks without responsibilities like kids, aging parents, etc. I really don’t think startups are very “risky”. What’s the worst that happens? It doesn’t work out and after five years you go get a job in boring corp corp with an incredible skillset and vast life experience. You’ve sacrificed some income perhaps, but so what? People make choices like that all the time. Your working career could easily be 40 or 45 years, 5 is not that much and it’s not like you went bankrupt. Your skillset might even mean you more than make up for lost time. I don’t understand the talk of “risk” unless you’re Elon Musk betting the farm on your businesses and facing bankruptcy. Work in your spare time until you have something Angel worthy, then get a modest salary to get to the next level and on you go. Or just bootstrap. Is it easy? No, it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Is it risky? Not so much. So why do Canadians and Brits see it as a risky thing to do? I think they don’t. What they see is _uncertainty_ - where will I be in six months? What if it doesn’t work out? What if I fail and people judge me? They don’t like uncertainty. That is conservative with a small c. Probably it’s a cultural artefact rather than anything remotely rational. The problem is you end up in an equilibrium where the society is conservative (“what you wanna do wasting your time with that”) so the ambitious people just leave and go to somewhere like (parts of) the US where people want to change things, make things, improve the world. And the conservative society gets more conservative until it is ossified. Startups carry high uncertainty but not high risk.
  - vasco 2y ago
    This depends on what you see as risk. If I can safely earn for 5 years way above national average and build a strong savings egg that can provide income forever. Or I can fail at a startup and be close to zero five years later, the fact that you aren't homeless and starving and can get another job doesn't mean it wasn't risky, you still wasted a bunch of years compared to slow and steady accumulation. I've read the majority of millionaires in the US get created like this, working and saving through decades. You're basically repeating investor kool-aid, because for their model to work, 100 people will fail and 1 succeed, and so they tell you to not worry if you're in the 99.
langsoul-com 2y ago
Why would anyone start the game on hard mode when easy mode is a border drive away? Us is so outrageously better than the rest that people fly across oceans to start businesses there. Canada, being next door, doesn't have the distance moat to at least slow down the brain drain
- threatofrain 2y ago
  With regards to talent, there's no particular reason why software centers couldn't be in any major established city in the world. It's not like it takes billions of dollars on a highly uncertain bet like creating a car company, rocket reuse company, or a CPU company. A small crew of people could potentially build the next WhatsApp. On Erlang.
  - resonious 2y ago
    There are definitely many good programmers all over the world, but there are more in the US, because that's where all the best companies are. So if you're trying to make a good company and you want good programmers, where do you go?
    - OJFord 2y ago
      You stay where you are and hire the ones willing or keen to work remotely?
  - ForHackernews 2y ago
    In the case of AI it absolutely does take billions and billions of dollars on an uncertain bet. They bet that throwing more data, more hardware, more GPU cycles at the problem would yield results and it has.
  - pquki4 2y ago
    Eh, $$$? I know people from "first world" countries like Japan and France that are come to work in the US simply because it pays much more.
  - 2y ago
crucialfelix 2y ago
Also: All your comedians move to the US to make it big.
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
Canada is addicted to rent seeking, monopoly businesses, corporations that push regulatory capture on the gov't and then parasitize, and -- most of all -- ripping resources out of the ground and selling them cheap, or doing the same with real estate. My latest annoyance is all the moaning and groaning about the latest capital gains tax increase. People complaining on one hand about how the Canadian economy lacks productivity, and then screaming to high heaven about tax policy that mostly only impacts people making quick speculative cash. Investment takes no risks in this country because they don't have to. They just dump money into real estate or oil & gas instead and then hang at the lake in the Muskokas.
raverbashing 2y ago
As much as people on this site like to complain about Europe (and a lot of it is merited) - I've found that Canada manages to be worse. Even having lower on avg bureaucracy
swat535 2y ago
As another Canadian, I feel the same but I'm not surprised one bit. Canada is actively hostile towards tech and suffers from crippling salaries and investments. The idea of "business" in this country is buying a house and renting its basement. Our government's incompetence is comical, we are nothing but more than a tech talent / immigration proxy for United States at this point.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  I don't know, Canada and every-other-country-that's-not-the-US. When there's a neighbor that is flush with cash, where make-or-break is a kind of national disease ... what can you do? (I'm an American, FWIW.)
  - mdorazio 2y ago
    FWIW, Israel and China are the other two hotspots for building startups. It’s worth looking at how Israel did it since their model could work elsewhere. For example they have a government funded delegation that goes around to conferences solely to meet with large companies and investors and promote Israeli startups.
- drdrek 2y ago
  Its a mix of "Easy" things to fix: Streamline tax code, build desirable office centers, Have good internet infrastructure and "Hard" Things: The work culture, Cost of living
sonofaragorn 2y ago
Aidan Gomez, Nick Frost, and Ivan Zhang, all of whom were Hinton's students at UofT started Cohere (https://cohere.com/about https://cohere.com/about)
boringg 2y ago
I've thought about this one for a long time having lived in both SV and Canada. It is a complicated one but there are a handful of critical road blocks in Canada that make it more challenging. (1) Access to size of market even if online being US vs 'foreign' has advantages in political arena/regulatory benefits (2) Significant tax advantages for US investors vs limited tax advantages for Canada (Angel+VC) (3) Risk Appetite (impacted by size of market) - compounded by tax disadvantages (why would you take risk if your lining the pockets of the government?) (4) Bench depth on talent once you really start to scale your company (5) CAD strength (double edged sword) - talent goes South for better salaries (+ you need to compete), if the company revenue is in USD and employees are paid in CAD (6) Start-ups paying in equity, early employees taking on that risk actually will get taxed heavily under new cap gains so the incentive to work hard for money is lower. (7) Network effects of being in the valley - idea percolation, new playbooks, talent, competitiveness, company fitness I will add that in this very specific AI case there is limited way you are going to find the depth of talent and capital in the country to make that company fly at the scale it needs to be.
- jpalawaga 2y ago
  if the idea that high taxes disincentivizes people from building stuff, california would be a wasteland. but that's not what we see. people build because they still have a chance a making a lot of money. also, like canada can build successfully tech companies. yes, I realize there should be more canadian tech darlings, but I don't think it has to do with high taxes so much as it has to do with Canadians being comfortable and not feeling the need to sacrifice everything to try and build the biggest thing. If you look at Canada's most successful tech companies, the founders usually sell and enjoy a more comfortable existence.
  - somebodythere 2y ago
    California benefits from a dominant market position. If you have the choice to found where the investors and the talent are, why would you pick Canada when the tax is the same?
  - lesuorac 2y ago

chollida1 2y ago

Oh man that was an amazing time at UoT. We also got GPU versions of btc mining from that group. We also had Ethereum be born right around there as well around 2014. I remember the first Ethereum meetups around Queen and Spadina with Vitalik. But to another posters point. Even though we had the father of deep learning Geoffrey Hinton and lumiaries like Ilya, and Vitalik, we didn't manage to get any real benefit from that.

snowbyte 2y ago
Wow! By the time I arrived, Hinton was gone. As well as many great professors that started their own companies or were poached by big players (i.e. Sanja-Nvidia). At least I got to learn NN from Jimmy Ba (author of Adam). Now, he's working at xAI.