OpenAI, an artificial intelligence (AI) research organization based in Burlington, Ontario, and Laval, Quebec, is forming a new team to address the challenges posed by superintelligent AI systems. Led by Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and co-founder, the team will focus on developing methods to steer and control these advanced AI systems. Currently, there is no effective solution to prevent a superintelligent AI from going rogue. The existing techniques, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, rely on human supervision, which becomes unreliable when dealing with AI systems smarter than humans.
This development comes as Canadian tech startups Tiptap and Omnirobotic face financial challenges, resulting in the need for restructuring. These two companies are among several Canadian startups struggling to secure venture capital due to reasons like rising interest rates and decreased investor interest in tech firms.
AI took center stage at the tech conference Collision in Toronto, where leading venture capitalists and AI experts discussed the explosive rise of AI in recent months. Cohere, an AI startup founded by Aidan Gomez and Nick Frosst, aimed to compete with their former employer, Google. However, due to the need for significant computing power, they returned to Google to request a sale of the required resources.
GeologicAI, a mining tech startup based in Calgary, recently secured $20 million USD in Series A funding from Bill Gates’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures. The company specializes in using AI, advanced machine vision, and proprietary core sample scanning hardware to help mining and exploration companies gather data more efficiently than traditional core logging methods.
Another Toronto-based company, Shakudo, raised $9.5 million CAD ($7.2 million USD) in Series A funding. Shakudo’s focus is on helping companies launch AI products quickly and cost-effectively, without building foundational models.
SoftBank, the global tech investor, is investing in Japanese robotics startup Telexistence. Telexistence develops AI-powered robotic arms for retail and logistics industries and plans to deploy its robots in 300 FamilyMart convenience stores across Japan.
Rebecca Parsons, CTO-Emerita of Thoughtworks, shared her insights on the significant changes in AI development over the years and discussed the need for regulation and concerns about AI’s impact on society.
Kids Help Phone (KHP), a Canadian mental health services provider, is collaborating with the Vector Institute in Toronto to expand its use of AI in delivering mental health services. By utilizing natural language processing, KHP can adapt its dataset to better understand the way young people speak and provide more precise support.
Mastercard is offering a new AI-powered tool to help banks identify customers attempting to transfer funds to fraudulent accounts. Trained on years of transaction data, the tool predicts if someone is involved in authorized push payment scams and enables banks to take appropriate action.
Finally, a community-submitted list of events surrounding the Startupfest in Montreal, scheduled for July 12 to 14, has been compiled. Some events are free or do not require a Startupfest pass, while others require tickets or are invite-only.
