With U of T innovators front and centre, Collision conference wraps up five-year Toronto run

Aidan Gomez, a U of T alumnus, talked about how AI will be used to augment the workforce. (Photo by Polina Teif)

Budding entrepreneurs, leading scientists and future business leaders from the University of Toronto community played a leading role at the 2024 Collision tech conference in downtown Toronto.

Running over three days this week, the conference drew some 40,000 attendees from across the spheres of tech, business and media, including more than 1,600 startups and 700 investors.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies and their impact on business and society were key themes for many of the conference’s keynotes and exhibits — so it was no surprise that U of T’s AI luminaries were front and centre.

They included U of T computer science alumnus Aidan Gomez, co-founder of language processing startup Cohere — which has raised hundreds of millions from investors and generated significant industry buzz.

He urged businesses to commit to adopting AI tools to support their workers.

“Making sure that you’re delivering the tools that your employees need to be competitive and effective is crucial,” Gomez said during his talk on Tuesday.

He added that augmentation of workforces with AI co-pilots and assistants is inevitable — including in industries that might not stand out as obvious adopters of the technology. He shared the example of a natural resources insurance firm that built an AI co-pilot — powered by Cohere — to help their actuaries speed up their research, craft more accurate bids and win more contracts.

“I never would have thought a natural resources insurance company would be adopting LLMs [large language models], but they are, and it’s having an impact. It’s actually helping them win more business,” Gomez said. “So I think the technology is completely horizontal.”

Gomez also cited the medical sector — particularly, drug discovery — as another area that’s poised to benefit massively from AI advances.

Geoffrey Hinton warned of the existential dangers posed by unchecked AI development. (Photo by Johnny Guatto)

University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, the influential computer scientist often dubbed the “godfather of AI,” also identified medical care and productivity as two key areas that will see significant improvements thanks to AI. However, much of his discussion, titled "Can We Control AI?", focused on his previously-cited concerns about how AI development could ultimately wrest control from humans given the current race to develop the technology and the absence of sufficient safeguards.

“Even if I’m totally benevolent and I just want to achieve what you asked me to achieve, I’ll realize that if I get more control, it will be easier to do that,” Hinton said of AI agents.

“And actually, if these things are much smarter than us, they’ll realize: Just take the control away from people and it will be much more efficient … and that seems to be like a very slippery path.”

Gomez, for his part, said he doesn’t believe AI poses a serious threat.

“The notion that the technology is going to start self-improving, that it’s going to start manipulating people, that it’s going to take over, seize power and displace humans: that’s a sci-fi narrative,” he said. “I am empathetic to it – we’ve been writing stories about that exact scenario for decades, since before computers, and so it’s very deeply embedded in our cultural brainstems ... I just don’t think it’s true.”

Earlier at the conference, Raquel Urtasun, founder of self-driving trucking startup Waabi, spoke about generative AI and how Waabi is applying the technology to autonomous trucks. Her keynote took place following the company’s announcement that it raised US$200 million in Series B funding to support the deployment of driverless trucks in 2025.

“Everything will be controlled by generative AI systems inside the vehicle and nothing else. This is a breakthrough for the industry, where such a thing has never happened before,” said Urtasun, a professor in the department of computer science in U of T's Faculty of Arts & Science.

Read more at U of T News:
— “With U of T innovators front and centre, Collision conference wraps up five-year Toronto run” by Rahul Kalvapalle and Adina Bresge

Geoffrey Hinton to give scholarly talk on whether AI will eclipse human intelligence

Geoffrey Hinton will be giving an academic talk on artificial intelligence at Convocation Hall on Oct. 27. (Photo: Polina Teif)

After capturing the world’s attention with his warnings about the existential risks posed by rapid advancements in artificial intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton will be engaging directly with researchers and scholars at a University of Toronto event. 

A U of T University Professor Emeritus in the Department of Computer Science who is often referred to as “the godfather of AI,” Hinton will tackle the question “Will digital intelligence replace biological intelligence?” during an academic talk at Convocation Hall on Oct. 27. (Tickets to the in-person event are sold out, but a recording will be shared publicly at a later date). 

His lecture will be followed by a Q&A session co-ordinated by Sheila McIlraith, a professor in the Department of Computer Science in the Faculty of Arts & Science who is a Canada CIFAR AI Chair and an associate director at U of T’s Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. 

The session will give Hinton an opportunity to directly engage with researchers and scholars from across the university regarding the revolutionary technology he helped create.  

“AI is re-shaping the way we live, work and interact with each other,” says McIlraith. “Given the current public discourse about AI, it’s particularly important that scholars across disciplines learn from each other and engage in an informed exchange of views regarding the societal implications of this transformative technology.” 

U of T provides an ideal forum for such scholarly discourse, she adds, because of U of T’s historical role in the development of AI, the “breadth and depth” of expertise at the university and the city of Toronto’s position as a global hub of AI research and development. 

"The conversation around AI is no longer housed in the computer science lab or within the offices of Big Tech. It needs to be multidisciplinary to advance our collective understanding of the opportunities and the potential risks so we can work to avoid the risks while benefiting from all that AI has to offer.”  

The Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society and the department of computer science in the Faculty of Arts & Science are co-hosting Hinton’s talk in collaboration with the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Cosmic Future Initiative at the Faculty of Arts & Science. 

— Original story by Adina Bresge for U of T News

Humanity is at a ‘turning point’ with AI, Geoffrey Hinton tells CBS News's 60 Minutes

University Professor Geoffrey Hinton speaks with 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley about advanced artificial intelligence. (Image courtesy of 60 Minutes)

Geoffrey Hinton, often dubbed the “godfather of artificial intelligence,” explained the potential benefits — and risks — of the technology he helped bring into existence on CBS News’s 60 Minutes.

A University Professor Emeritus in U of T’s Department of Computer Science, Hinton told correspondent Scott Pelley about his decision earlier this year to sound the alarm about the existential threat posed by the rapid development of large language models such as ChatGPT and Google’s PaLM.

The cognitive psychologist and computer scientist, whose research contributions set the stage for the current acceleration of AI development, says he has no regrets because of the technology’s enormous potential benefits. But he warns that humanity is at a “turning point” in determining AI’s trajectory — and that the decisions we make today could have far-reaching consequences for the future.

“I think my main message is there's enormous uncertainty about what's (going to) happen next,” Hinton told the newsmagazine program. “These things do understand. And because they understand, we need to think hard about what's going to happen next. And we just don't know.”

Watch the 60 Minutes interview

U of T CS faculty and alumni among Time magazine’s TIME100 Most Influential People in AI

2023 TIME100 AI cover (Credit: TIME)

Time magazine has unveiled the inaugural TIME100 AI, a new list highlighting the 100 most influential people in artificial intelligence, and U of T Department of Computer Science faculty and alumni are among those recognized.  

The 2023 TIME100 AI issue is categorized by leaders, innovators, shapers and thinkers who are influencing today’s AI landscape, and features in-depth profiles and interviews.  

Alumnus Aidan Gomez (HBSc 2018) who is the CEO and co-founder of Cohere, a Toronto-based company that builds and provides language AI models to enterprises, is credited by the magazine for co-authoring “a research paper that would change the entire AI industry” that proposed a novel neural network technique called the transformer. The magazine notes that Gomez chose to focus on working with businesses “because he believed that it was the ‘best way to close the gap’ between AI models being explored in theory vs. being deployed out in the world.” 

Professor Raquel Urtasun, CEO and founder of autonomous driving startup Waabi, tells the magazine about the upsides to entering the space later as a “second mover.” Urtasun notes that it allowed the company to take advantage of recent advances in AI, such as the ability to train its driverless software “much faster and more cheaply than its competitors in part by driving virtual trucks inside a highly realistic AI-generated simulation.” 

Alumnus Ilya Sutskever (HBSc 2005, MSc 2007, PhD 2013), co-founder and chief scientist at OpenAI, is noted by the publication as “one of the industry’s most celebrated technical minds.” Before joining OpenAI as a founding member in 2015, Time notes he “was already famous for breakthroughs that turbocharged the fields of computer vision and machine translation.” 

University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton is recognized as “one of the most influential AI researchers of the past 50 years” playing an instrumental role in the development and popularization of neural networks. The magazine also details his recent decision to leave his post at Google to speak more freely about the risks of AI and “his regrets over helping bring that technology into existence.” 

Read more at Time: 

The complete 2023 TIME100 AI list 

How We Chose the TIME100 Most Influential People in AI