Talents on Sale
No, Ricola has nothing to do with it. But the principle — sow the idea, let someone else harvest — that is deeply Swiss. Fair enough.
Canada has invested billions of dollars to get AI off the ground. Where it will ultimately lead — who can say?
Countries that invest before they know where the journey is going deserve respect. And sometimes a little sympathy. Whether in research, education, sustainability, or social justice — such achievements suit any country well. It is about the horizon that does not care about election cycles. Now, Canada has enormously gifted talent in its portfolio. Yoshua Bengio, for example, co-invented deep learning. And in Toronto lives a man named Geoffrey Hinton, who trained the first neural networks.
Come again?
What on earth is deep learning? Simply put: machines — that is, applications — bend their non-existent heads deep into a subject and learn. Without tiring. They are the foundation for the topic of all topics: artificial intelligence. That discipline which is, in fact, familiar to us humans from birth. We learn. Whether deep or shallow, we learn as we go.
Bengio and Hinton made it possible for machines not only to read human language but to understand it — truly understand it. Equally remarkable, AI recognises images with a precision that was not even remotely conceivable before. And the combination of those two abilities sets robotics — and its hunger for automation — into high gear.
So far, so artificial.
Back to Canada’s investments in talents like Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton. What emerged in Canada was also taught there — at universities, in laboratories, from person to person. But the story does not end in Canada. Two thirds of these talents leave their Canadian home heading south, to the United States or to other parts of the world. And they do not come back.
Canada has all these splendid, brilliant seedlings that promise a glowing future. Yet apparently the soil is missing — the kind in which they can put down roots and flourish. The attentive neighbours notice this and plant the talent in their own ground. And they harvest.
Somewhere between the seedling and the fruit, a station is missing — the moment where a promise becomes a product, where a prototype becomes something real. What is missing is a place — in Canada itself — where idea, theory, and market are allowed to find each other. Not somewhere in the world, but in the country of the original investment.
Between sowing the talent and the harvest, one ought not forget the watering, eh
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