\n Toronto now boasts the world\u2019s third best tech talent market, ahead of New York City but behind San Francisco and Seattle, according to an annual analysis<\/a> by commercial real estate firm CBRE. That\u2019s thanks to educational institutions like the University of Toronto, and public-private research institutes like the Vector Institute, which Hinton co-founded to help commercialize AI breakthroughs.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI was lucky because very few people were working on this 20 years ago, and so smart young students would come to Toronto \u2026 and they\u2019ve now turned into a whole generation of AI leaders,\u201d Hinton told CNN in an interview in Toronto.\n <\/p>\n \n Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney is now aiming to boost the local AI ecosystem with a national AI strategy<\/a> that includes more than $2 billion in spending on AI research, education and efforts to increase adoption, as well as new safety guardrails.\n <\/p>\n \n Toronto\u2019s growing AI power comes as trade relations between the United States and Canada have deteriorated. A trade war<\/a> has exploded in recent weeks, with Canadian officials seeking to protect the country\u2019s industries. It may be yet another reason why the country\u2019s tech investments are important.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t think we can afford for Canada to get all this technology from the States or from China,\u201d Hinton said.\n <\/p>\n \n Among Toronto\u2019s new generation of AI leaders is Nick Frosst, who studied under Hinton at the University of Toronto and was one of the first hires at Hinton\u2019s Google AI lab in Toronto in 2017. Frosst then went on to co-found the $7 billion enterprise AI firm Cohere.\n <\/p>\n \n Frosst decided against the traditional route of moving to Silicon Valley to start his company for a simple reason: He likes living in Toronto.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThere\u2019s a great tech ecosystem, there\u2019s also a great arts community, there\u2019s also a great academic community, there\u2019s a great business community,\u201d said Frosst, who also fronts Toronto-based indie rock band Good Kid. \u201cAll of it is here.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Many other founders in the city feel the same.\n <\/p>\n \n Gennady Pekhimenko, who sold his startup CentML to Nvidia<\/a> last year and now serves as senior director of AI software for the chip giant, said Toronto\u2019s international food scene serves as a useful recruiting tool for out-of-town talent.\n <\/p>\n \n Tomi Poutanen, founder and CEO at AI healthcare firm Signal 1, mentioned the benefits of Canada\u2019s healthcare system and Toronto\u2019s famed \u201cHospital Row.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Hinton added that, unlike the United States under the Trump administration, Canada welcomes immigration, which tech firms have long relied on as a talent pipeline. One of Pekhimenko\u2019s first hires at CentML was an Amazon engineer who was unable to renew his H1-B visa to stay in the United States. He could, however, get a Canadian work permit.\n <\/p>\n \n Friendlier immigration policies make it easier to attract international talent who likely have a knack for thinking about how to serve a global market, said Jordan Jacobs, managing partner at investment firm Radical Ventures.\n <\/p>\n \n Toronto also benefits from close proximity to major markets such as New York, Washington, DC and Chicago.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cYou can get on a flight that\u2019s 90 minutes long and reach 200 million people,\u201d Jacobs said.\n <\/p>\n \n San Francisco is still the undisputed center of the tech industry, with around 20% more tech workers than Toronto, according to CBRE. Tech firms are also making a big push back into the city center after many dispersed during the Covid-19 pandemic.\n <\/p>\n \n Still, builders in Toronto\u2019s AI ecosystem say they benefit from being headquartered outside the Silicon Valley bubble.\n <\/p>\n \n The cost of living is generally less expensive in Toronto, thanks in part to lower home prices, socialized healthcare and good public schools, local founders say. That means high-quality talent can come cheaper, too. (Although many Toronto AI firms also have a California presence.)\n <\/p>\n \n Toronto also doesn\u2019t struggle with high staff turnover rates in the same way as San Francisco, according to Ray Reddy, a former vice president of Shopify who is building a new startup in stealth.\n <\/p>\n \n In Silicon Valley, \u201ceven people who are very mission driven are always looking over their shoulder, like, is there something better there?\u201d said Reddy, who previously worked at Google\u2019s Silicon Valley headquarters.\n <\/p>\n \n San Francisco is often characterized by its hype and unbridled enthusiasm around AI, but Frosst says there\u2019s an openness to friendly debate in Toronto that feels unique.\n <\/p>\n \n Frosst offered his own relationship with friend and mentor Hinton as an example: the two have long disagreed on core questions, like whether building AI constitutes creating a new type of being or simply a tool. But they still regularly play chess together, and Frosst will bring up the debate in hopes of throwing Hinton off. (Hinton\u2019s game is normally undeterred, he said.)\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI think it goes back to \u2026 Toronto and Canada not being a monoculture,\u201d Frosst said. \u201cIt isn\u2019t just tech workers here, it\u2019s a bit of everything, and I think that leads to innovation, it leads to people thinking about what isn\u2019t popular.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Already, Canada\u2019s digital sector contributes more than $140 billion to the country\u2019s GDP, according to the government<\/a>. And the local AI ecosystem has other benefits for the country, according to Hinton.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIf AI causes a lot of unemployment, we\u2019ll want the profits that are made by replacing workers to stay within Canada, so they can be taxed within Canada to support the replaced workers,\u201d Hinton said.\n <\/p>\n \n What\u2019s more, governments and companies around the world are increasingly looking to diversify away from buying advanced technology solely from the United States. That\u2019s created an \u201congoing advantage\u201d for Canada-based firms, Frosst said.\n <\/p>\n \n Cohere received an influx<\/a> of new customer inquiries after the White House in June put export controls<\/a> on Anthropic\u2019s advanced AI models.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe flag of Canada is one that builds trust,\u201d Frosst said. \u201cWe\u2019re looking to increase the resiliency and independence of anybody who uses our technology, and broadly I think Canada, as a country, is interested in doing the same for all of our partners.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n And while the most well-known tech investors are in Silicon Valley, being located elsewhere is no longer an obstacle to fundraising.\n <\/p>\n \n Raquel Urtasun left her role running Uber\u2019s autonomous driving lab in Toronto to start self-driving semitruck company Waabi five years ago. She founded the company in Toronto, although it\u2019s piloting its trucks mainly in the American southwest. Earlier this year, Waabi raised a more than $1 billion Series C, the largest funding round in Canadian history.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cAt the end of the day, what attracts investors is: what is going to be the top company that is leading a massive market,\u201d Urtasun told CNN. \u201cWhether we are in Canada, whether we are in the Silicon Valley, it didn\u2019t really matter.\u201d\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Toronto, Canada\u00a0\u2014\u00a0 Geoffrey Hinton, a Nobel Prize-winning computer scientist, took a leap in the 1980s \u2014 leaving a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":614143,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":["post-614142","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=614142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/614142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/614143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=614142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=614142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=614142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Cohere](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/09\/still-22785861-1617063-11-still.jpg\")
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