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.
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.
French citizen living in Montreal. The easiest way is probably to come here with a PVT (Programme Vacances-Travail, or Working Holiday VISA) but you must be under 35.
You could also find a firm willing to hire you but there will be paperwork and they'll have to prove that they haven't found a Canadian citizen for the position you'll occupy. It's a bit of a pain for the company but some companies are used to this (consulting firms mostly). You'll then have a 2 years VISA + working permit.
Or you can go the permanent resident way, from France, but it's gonna take a long time (often 3+ years).
My advice is to come here as a tourist for a few weeks to have a feeling of the city. Try to come in winter, as it's a bit harsh and a non negligible number of expats go back to their home countries after their first winter here. Other than that, it's a really beautiful place and I love living there (been almost 5 years now).
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.
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.
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).
"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."
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...
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
nothing remotely approaching the intelligence of a cat or
dog, much less a human being, has appeared except in very
limited domains.
Even machines with the intelligence of a fruit fly or lizard are useful, if you can industrialize the application of them. That is essentially how Alpha Go works.
Computers are far better now in solving complex tasks widely considered as requiring intelligence like video captioning and speech recognition, automatic driving and playing complex games. The change is due to hardware engineering that enabled enormous computing and data acquision/storage power compared to 1990s and a possibility to conduct machine intelligence experiments at unprecedented scale and speed which lead to better algorithms.
If, instead, you want to know when or if AI will match human intelligence or become self-consciuos - sadly no one knows that. We may be "advancing" in totally wrong direction.
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.
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.
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.
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. ;)
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.
> 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
> 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.
You are making such blanket statements of stereotypes.
The "career" of an artist, as you mention, is not something for you to judge the quality or success of. I suppose that because the great writer Bukowski was still working as an unknown postal worker at age 50 that he was also too late in his career. Or the many other artists with similar "careers". It's not you to judge someone else's artistic output, or for that matter, the quality of a network of people based on the language they speak.
" Francophone networks are weak. They are very local, and poor"
A) French speaking Quebecers are poor, relative to N. America. Median wages are 'ok' due to lots of 'decent' government jobs, but mean wages for Francophones are very low.
B) Francophone business networks usually don't expand beyond Quebec. There are no elite Universities in Quebec (McGill is pretty good, but not French), and there is zero access to networks from elite schools among Francophones.
C) There are very few wealthy Francophone Quebecers who 'write cheques' for startups.
Ergo - networks are very weak here, it's just a fact.
I've lived in several cities in N.America/Europe, this is by far the weakest of 'known cities'. It's probably better than Orlando. Or Dublin. But worse than any of Boston, Toronto, Vancouver, Frankfurt, etc..
"The "career" of an artist, as you mention, is not something for you to judge the quality or success of. "
I'll judge these people however I want, but it's not a judgement to point out that people who prefer to serve coffee and write 1 short play every 10 years aren't the kinds of people who build high-tech startups. I know these people very well (I live in ground-zero of French Montreal), they prefer to do other things, that's fine, it's not a judgement, just a reality. (FYI Bukowski was prolific - he wrote tons of stuff).
A 'circus' - yes. I can't think of any other place in North America where 'Cirque du Soleil' could be born. And it seems there's a huge plethora of 'artisanal' small-scale things ...
I like Montreal, which is why I live here, and I have no doubt there will be some startups here and there that will win, but it will never be the 'leader' in any classical, industrious lines of business. There will likely never be a full-blown ecosystem here for any industry that doesn't already exist.
The people here do not have any interest in building it.
There are no elite Universities in Quebec (McGill is
pretty good, but not French), and there is zero access to
networks from elite schools among Francophones.
Another blanket statement. What constitutes an "elite" university?
The Francophones in Quebec have traditionally been, as a population, mostly against making "big bucks". One of the reasons was the religion. The other was that the anglophone ruling class were more than happy to (read "actively engaged in") suppress French success in general.
A lot of things changed in the last century. There are a lot of first generation University students in Quebec today, most of them French speaking. Naturally, the wages in general are expected to be lower. But one has to make the distinction about cost of living. It's lower in Quebec than in a lot of other places. This would explain the relative lower number of French Quebecois who "sign checks" - although they do exist.
Do you have any idea how big is the "circus"? There are some interesting documentaries/reporting on YouTube. Worth checking out. Another big company is the Desjardins bank, which was ranked #1 strongest bank in North America last year IIRC.
Success is relative, it depends on your social status and on what your peers define as being successful. Sure you can apply the SV VC definition of successful to mostly anywhere in the world, and you won't be much impressed. That doesn't mean the locals aren't successful. For a example, for a long time in Quebec the definition of being successful was becoming a pharmacist, doctor, dentist or lawyer. That's something that is being felt today still: a lot of potentially great scientists/entrepreneurs just want to become doctors, because doctors are successful.
Arguably this is no different from elsewhere, but combined with the general population lagging behind the rest of N-A with regards to accumulated wealth and level of education, the net effects are bad (IMO). But the gap is lowering, and I know plenty of young people with big ambitions. Time will tell, but I'm an optimist for the future.
You're taking this personally, which I think is clouding your view.
You don't need to lecture me on the history of Quebec, I'm well aware.
Harvard and Stanford are 'elite' schools.
U. Laval is not.
"Do you have any idea how big is the "circus"?" - it's somewhat less than $1 Billion revenue - which is not that huge.
Desjardins? Ha ... I use Desjardins as my main account - it's backwards and the most 'behind' of any major bank in Canada. I can't get a Visa Debit - among other things. Desjardins is '#1' in stability basically - because they are like a franchise and each branch is separate bank - they have extremely low lending leverage. This gives them a high degree of 'stability' (but also underperformance).
Don't be personal about it, I sense from your writing that you already know Montreal is not a 'winning city' and is not really moving in that direction.
Obviously I'm not 'anti Montreal' or I wouldn't chose to live here.
It's a great town, even a great town to build a startup in, but the people here have little interest in building industries, in the classical sense.
I appreciate that I may come across as personally irritated - I am indeed a bit. Quebec bashing does get tiring, and your condescending tone and seemingly facile arguments did annoy me.
I don't understand the logic of people who hold the arguments you bring forth. It's as if because you're not "elite" (whatever that means) now, you will never be.
Yoshua Bengio's dream (if I may) is to make Montreal a global hotspot of AI research. That's all. Now you (and others) can bash it all you want, blame the local population, blame the language, blame the education system - whatever.
To me, the fact that some people are reacting the way you are is actually confirmation that things are doing well - quite contrary to your frankly misguided assumption that I have a defeatist opinion of the city and the province in general.
You can start by getting the Quebec government to reduce the highest bracket income taxes which are a full 10% greater than the rest of Canada and about 12% greater than NY/California.
Just kidding :)
I would say if you want to help, go and work for a startup, or a growing private company that is not just a services entity who's #1 client is the government.
"With access to six universities and twelve junior colleges in an 8 kilometer (5 mi) radius, Montreal, Quebec (Canada) has the highest proportion of post-secondary students of all major cities in North America. "
All of the examples you gave are small college towns.
'Ames' 'Ithaca' 'State College' - those are not cities etc.
Montreal has 6 major universities and other colleges crammed right downtown in a tiny radius.
San Francisco does not have 300K students in the city. There are only 800K residents in SF, that would make almost 50% students :). The 'Bay Area' - sure. But the bay is huge - and not really even a city.
Chicago is a massive, sprawling city with 600K students.
Montreal - not including the suburbs, just the city proper, has 100's of thousands of students.
I think the only other city with the student density would be Boston and the numbers may be off because Harvard and MIT are technically in Cambridge, not Boston.
What the OP stated and what I was responding to was:
>"Montreal has more students/capita than anywhere in North America, due to a clustering of big Unis downtown"
They did not state Montreal has the highest student population density areas which is what you are now saying by qualifying that with some spatial component. They said highest "per capita."
They also did not specify "city", they said "anywhere."
Well that would be a measure of density - more students per square meter or something. I'm not sure why that would be relevant if we're talking about the city as a whole.
Not sure where this myth comes from. America is a land of immigrants, and hundreds of languages are spoken here. Right up there with India and Indonesia.
The US is a very diverse place, compared to many other countries. In the place I grew up, the schools basically had to translate their materials for parents into Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Farsi (looks like Urdu has now been added to that list). Nevertheless, it is a common stereotype that American tourists have a reputation of being unwilling to put any effort into learning foreign languages.
I'll add that it appears to me that French-speakers appear to be the snottiest about it. I suspect that has much to do with the fact that English has largely supplanted French as the main international language of business and politics (which largely dates back to Wilson insisting that English be used when negotiating the Versailles treaty after WWI).
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).
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).
That's way cool. I'm a cybernetics graduate, and I've long thought that the current ways of regulating processes could probably be improved upon with ML. Tough to get any one to pay attention because PID is usually good enough, and the field generally value mathematical analyzability, which ANNs are not particularly known for.
While these may not be pleasant attitudes, the effects are real.
There's a pretty big disincentive for anglophone engineers to move to Montreal, say from Toronto. Not sure about Waterloo. Waterloo's kind of dead, so I imagine graduates being glad to move anywhere more interesting.
I'm in Waterloo at the moment. There are a lot of really good investments being made currently, but you're bang on with your thought that graduates are glad to move anywhere but here. It's hard to get people to come here from Toronto, never mind from somewhere in the USA.
Waterloo is very much a place where no one lives but everyone comes to for either a job or for school. Once either of those two are completed, the person leaves.
With continued investment, things will change. But, Rome wasn't built in a day.
Are you in Toronto? What makes people hesitate before moving to Montreal? The usual "disincentive" is the language - a lot of people (including immigrants) just don't care about learning French. Personally though, I have met plenty of immigrants (at school and work) and from my own sampling, the more educated immigrants all learn French - it's a no-brainer for them. They consider it a genuine advantage, not a chore. For natives though, that's another story.
Self-delusions of grandeur of Quebeckers are funny.
What does this article have to do with "Quebeckers"? If you had frequented any of the mentioned universities you would know they are full of foreign students, especially so in the graduate programs. 150 hackers != the whole province.
Too bad they can't attract talent and can't use the ones
they attracted there
You are self-contradicting. Google just opened an AI lab there[0], and it wants to turn Montreal into a "super-cluster of AI knowledge"[1]. Nobody is affirming that Montreal is the only place where AI research is going on. They're merely pointing out that recent investments and research base are putting it in a very good position worldwide. Is that false?
Montreal is a great city but gets dragged down by the
French Quebec BS
What does "French Quebec" have to do with this story? Did you flip out because you saw some accented characters?
You hate French speaking Québécois, for your own personal reasons. Keep it to yourself. It has no place here (an anywhere, really). I'm glad that your brand of instinctive Quebec hate is not very popular amongst the general population.
I may have been too harsh, but there are issues that merit discussion
> What does this article have to do with "Quebeckers"? If you had frequented any of the mentioned universities you would know they are full of foreign students, especially so in the graduate programs
Because it overly emphasizes the importance of Montreal in the DL area. It really sounds like someone exaggerating it, but it could be only a PR piece.
Having 150 research students is important, but having an industry to support that is essencial. Do you think the 150 will be hired by the new Google lab?
> They're merely pointing out that recent investments and research base are putting it in a very good position worldwide. Is that false?
Not false. But we'll see what comes out of it.
> What does "French Quebec" have to do with this story?
So millions of people who feel strongly about things you don't agree with is bullshit? You might have been too harsh, but you are not helping your case.
The city's aiming high. Some people there have a dream. And all you can do is bash them and denigrate them and tell us how their (in some cases actually very reasonable) political opinions will bring their demise. Should they just not even try? I don't understand your logic.
BTW, it was obviously a PR piece. At least we agree on that :)
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.