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Google Brain Toronto

canada.googleblog.com

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Re: Google Brain Toronto

#41

Post by whitenoice »

tachyonbeam wrote: post #22
dukeluke wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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

Do you have any source on India not having top research talent? From my understanding India has good amount of research and tech talent but it suffers a lot from brain drain to US universities. Especially students graduating from Indian institute of technology, national institute of technology + many more. In fact if you look into student (masters, phd) profiles of top US engineering schools like MIT, CMU, Stanford etc. most of the Indian students there have graduate degress from those Indian schools and they are in huge numbers. (who eventually end up at these companies or starting their own)

One of the main reasons for lack of research in India is lack of funding. Its nothing compared to US universities. But that does not imply it lacks talent. In fact primality test in polynomial time was founded by computer scientists at IIT - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKS_primality_test.

Re: Google Brain Toronto

#42

Post by FullMtlAlcoholc »

dukeluke wrote: post #30
FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

What keeps other countries like India from developing PhD's like that? It seems like they would have a strong incentive to do so.

I would imagine the quality of their university systems. I get the feeling that most top quality professors would not like to work for a university system run by the Indian government.

Re: Google Brain Toronto

#43

Post by 029r0823jr »

FT_intern wrote: post #37
mhkhung wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Waterloo is best at bleeding great Canadian engineers to the USA

Because U of T engineers decide to stay in Toronto out of the goodness of their hearts...?

If an engineer stays in Canada it's certainly not because they're being adequately compensated.

Re: Google Brain Toronto

#44

Post by 029r0823jr »

astrodust wrote: post #16
karpathy wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

> 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.

Re: Google Brain Toronto

#45

Post by perhonen »

FT_intern wrote: post #37
mhkhung wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Waterloo is best at bleeding great Canadian engineers to the USA

So does UofT - I myself and at least a dozen other 1T7 grads I know personally are headed south as soon as we graduate. This is a Canada-wide problem which won't be fixed unless salaries equalize.

Re: Google Brain Toronto

#46

Post by throwayedidqo »

eigenvector wrote: post #24

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…

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.

Re: Google Brain Toronto

#48

Post by AvenueIngres »

029r0823jr wrote: post #44
astrodust wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

>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.

Re: Google Brain Toronto

#49

Post by 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.

Re: Google Brain Toronto

#50

Post by trapperkeeper79 »

perhonen wrote: post #45
FT_intern wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waterloo is best at bleeding great Canadian engineers to the USA

So does UofT - I myself and at least a dozen other 1T7 grads I know personally are headed south as soon as we graduate. This is a Canada-wide problem which won't be fixed unless salaries equalize.

Spot on. This new institute (and other govt efforts like it) all fail to answer this fundamental question - why would someone work at half the pay (or less) if they were a Canadian citizen? It is a chicken-and-egg problem .. salaries and labour pool quality go hand in hand.
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