When walking around the U of Toronto, I often think that ~10 years ago Ilya was in a lab next to Alex trying to figure things out. I can't believe this new AI wave started there. Ilya, Karpathy, Jimmy Ba, and many more were at the right time when Hinton was there too.
Oh man that was an amazing time at UoT. We also got GPU versions of btc mining from that group.
We also had Ethereum be born right around there as well around 2014. I remember the first Ethereum meetups around Queen and Spadina with Vitalik.
But to another posters point. Even though we had the father of deep learning Geoffrey Hinton and lumiaries like Ilya, and Vitalik, we didn't manage to get any real benefit from that.
Wow! By the time I arrived, Hinton was gone. As well as many great professors that started their own companies or were poached by big players (i.e. Sanja-Nvidia). At least I got to learn NN from Jimmy Ba (author of Adam). Now, he's working at xAI.
I've thought about this one for a long time having lived in both SV and Canada. It is a complicated one but there are a handful of critical road blocks in Canada that make it more challenging.
(1) Access to size of market even if online being US vs 'foreign' has advantages in political arena/regulatory benefits
(2) Significant tax advantages for US investors vs limited tax advantages for Canada (Angel+VC)
(3) Risk Appetite (impacted by size of market) - compounded by tax disadvantages (why would you take risk if your lining the pockets of the government?)
(4) Bench depth on talent once you really start to scale your company
(5) CAD strength (double edged sword) - talent goes South for better salaries (+ you need to compete), if the company revenue is in USD and employees are paid in CAD
(6) Start-ups paying in equity, early employees taking on that risk actually will get taxed heavily under new cap gains so the incentive to work hard for money is lower.
(7) Network effects of being in the valley - idea percolation, new playbooks, talent, competitiveness, company fitness
I will add that in this very specific AI case there is limited way you are going to find the depth of talent and capital in the country to make that company fly at the scale it needs to be.
if the idea that high taxes disincentivizes people from building stuff, california would be a wasteland.
but that's not what we see. people build because they still have a chance a making a lot of money.
also, like canada can build successfully tech companies. yes, I realize there should be more canadian tech darlings, but I don't think it has to do with high taxes so much as it has to do with Canadians being comfortable and not feeling the need to sacrifice everything to try and build the biggest thing.
If you look at Canada's most successful tech companies, the founders usually sell and enjoy a more comfortable existence.
Taxs on investors are quite high in Ontario/Canada compared to California. Not only does this minimize the outcome for the investor - it decreases the risk for making larger bets on big outcomes. In terms of exits -- you have a smaller playing field and fewer buyers being based in Canada vs USA. All the things add up to make a smaller opportunity for investors and builders and you work harder to pay more taxes to the government.
In terms for your ambition argument -- that could be an inherent problem in Canadian culture that no one wants to change the status quo - it is definitely a different culture than SV. The largest city is captured by financial industry for the most part which doesn't bode well for innovation.
I think it has much more to do with investors' sentiments. Canadian entrepreneurs are not comfortable; that's why they move to the US. But that's not because they don't like Canada. Moving is a big sacrifice -- they move away from their home and community, and also deal with the headache and uncertainty of US immigration. The ones I talk to who have moved down south, they miss Canada and didn't want to leave, but they didn't feel like they'd be able to afford the cost of living in Canada, and didn't think they could launch a successful startup there.
And the cost of living is going up, which is going to make even more talented Canadians uncomfortable. These days if you ever hope to own a house, you basically can't go the stable 9-to-5 route.
If investors in Canada were throwing hundreds of millions into moonshot startups the way that they do in Silicon Valley, probably most Canadian entrepreneurs would build those companies at home. But the investment landscape is such that the investors who have that much money opt to lever up on real estate instead.
The point was about high taxes for investors not employees.
How many money does OpenAI _directly_ pay to CA in taxes? Sure the employees pay a ton in taxes but as an investor if you're going to lose more in taxes by investing into a Canadian company vs a California company then you invest into CA.
California benefits from a dominant market position. If you have the choice to found where the investors and the talent are, why would you pick Canada when the tax is the same?
Why would anyone start the game on hard mode when easy mode is a border drive away?
Us is so outrageously better than the rest that people fly across oceans to start businesses there. Canada, being next door, doesn't have the distance moat to at least slow down the brain drain
With regards to talent, there's no particular reason why software centers couldn't be in any major established city in the world. It's not like it takes billions of dollars on a highly uncertain bet like creating a car company, rocket reuse company, or a CPU company.
A small crew of people could potentially build the next WhatsApp. On Erlang.
There are definitely many good programmers all over the world, but there are more in the US, because that's where all the best companies are. So if you're trying to make a good company and you want good programmers, where do you go?
In the case of AI it absolutely does take billions and billions of dollars on an uncertain bet. They bet that throwing more data, more hardware, more GPU cycles at the problem would yield results and it has.
That statement applies to most industries. Tons of areas have the potential for an industry boom, but silicon Valley in is California. Or semi conductors are in Taiwan.
For many reasons, only some areas succeed whilst the rest fail. In this case, Canada doesn't have silicon valley, nor do they have a high amount of start ups.
As another Canadian, I feel the same but I'm not surprised one bit.
Canada is actively hostile towards tech and suffers from crippling salaries and investments. The idea of "business" in this country is buying a house and renting its basement.
Our government's incompetence is comical, we are nothing but more than a tech talent / immigration proxy for United States at this point.
I don't know, Canada and every-other-country-that's-not-the-US. When there's a neighbor that is flush with cash, where make-or-break is a kind of national disease ... what can you do?
FWIW, Israel and China are the other two hotspots for building startups. It’s worth looking at how Israel did it since their model could work elsewhere. For example they have a government funded delegation that goes around to conferences solely to meet with large companies and investors and promote Israeli startups.
The Canadian Dream is to get a great education and then move of the US.
You might want to blame the government or this or that but I think as a Canadian I've finally come to reckon with the fact that it's just not in the Canadian ethos to do risky things like make startups. Of course there are exceptions to the rule but they are very very rare. Canadian investors don't want to take big risks and the Americans are just next door waiting to gobble up the talent in search of capital.
For folks without responsibilities like kids, aging parents, etc. I really don’t think startups are very “risky”.
What’s the worst that happens? It doesn’t work out and after five years you go get a job in boring corp corp with an incredible skillset and vast life experience.
You’ve sacrificed some income perhaps, but so what? People make choices like that all the time. Your working career could easily be 40 or 45 years, 5 is not that much and it’s not like you went bankrupt. Your skillset might even mean you more than make up for lost time.
I don’t understand the talk of “risk” unless you’re Elon Musk betting the farm on your businesses and facing bankruptcy.
Work in your spare time until you have something Angel worthy, then get a modest salary to get to the next level and on you go. Or just bootstrap.
Is it easy? No, it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do. Is it risky? Not so much.
So why do Canadians and Brits see it as a risky thing to do? I think they don’t. What they see is _uncertainty_ - where will I be in six months? What if it doesn’t work out? What if I fail and people judge me? They don’t like uncertainty. That is conservative with a small c. Probably it’s a cultural artefact rather than anything remotely rational. The problem is you end up in an equilibrium where the society is conservative (“what you wanna do wasting your time with that”) so the ambitious people just leave and go to somewhere like (parts of) the US where people want to change things, make things, improve the world. And the conservative society gets more conservative until it is ossified.
Startups carry high uncertainty but not high risk.
There are countries where the business culture makes you unemployable and almost impossible for you to get a loan for the rest of your live if you have ever failed a business (bad enough). Many countries aren't as open to failure as the US.
This depends on what you see as risk. If I can safely earn for 5 years way above national average and build a strong savings egg that can provide income forever.
Or I can fail at a startup and be close to zero five years later, the fact that you aren't homeless and starving and can get another job doesn't mean it wasn't risky, you still wasted a bunch of years compared to slow and steady accumulation.
I've read the majority of millionaires in the US get created like this, working and saving through decades.
You're basically repeating investor kool-aid, because for their model to work, 100 people will fail and 1 succeed, and so they tell you to not worry if you're in the 99.
Of course you could probably say at least some of the same things about grad degrees that may not really translate into appreciable different/better career outcomes. Of course some say exactly that, especially about PhDs.
Yes, you might waste five years (in your words) of income. But that is not a "risk".
A "risk" for me is "this could all go badly wrong". Not having an extra five years of savings is just a fairly straightforward consequence. It's predictably going to happen, I can decide if I want it.
Real risk is "something can go catastrophically wrong". If say you've taken out a huge bank loan to fund the business and you have to declare bankruptcy if it fails, now _that_ is a risk. But nearly every founder I've ever met has taken nothing like that risk.
That's my point, startups are not risky in that sense, for most people, most of the time. It's kinda strange that so many people think they are.
The increased cost of living in the last few years has changed this somewhat. That 5 years of lower earnings now means less nice groceries, fewer holidays and being under the yoke of landlords for considerably longer.
I can't speak for Canada and I may be a wrong, but it seems to me harder to loan money for business than in NA. Banks are the ones that don't want to take risks, not necessarily the people with ideas.
Also failures aren't considered the same in every job market.
Turns out there’s only enough people with this mindset to fill a couple hubs around the world. The rest prefers less volatility and happily takes on less downside risk for capped reward and/or less upside risk.
Canada is addicted to rent seeking, monopoly businesses, corporations that push regulatory capture on the gov't and then parasitize, and -- most of all -- ripping resources out of the ground and selling them cheap, or doing the same with real estate.
My latest annoyance is all the moaning and groaning about the latest capital gains tax increase. People complaining on one hand about how the Canadian economy lacks productivity, and then screaming to high heaven about tax policy that mostly only impacts people making quick speculative cash.
Investment takes no risks in this country because they don't have to. They just dump money into real estate or oil & gas instead and then hang at the lake in the Muskokas.
As much as people on this site like to complain about Europe (and a lot of it is merited) - I've found that Canada manages to be worse. Even having lower on avg bureaucracy
SRED is basically a subsidy for companies that do your SRED paperwork for you, not the company doing the engineering itself. There's a whole industry of this.
No evidence that SRED has done anything ever for actual R&D. I've seen people get SRED for making web pages in JavaScript&HTML. When I had to fill in the SRED stuff it was ridiculous. Someone doing actual innovation would throw their hands up in the air.
Not true. I've done SRED every year for the past ~7 years. It is work, but there are specialized consultants that do most of it. If the work is truly R&D (which would be the case for a cutting-edge AI company) and you track your work in JIRA or something like that, then it's mostly just writing a few pages describing the efforts.
It's also like pulling teeth trying to explain to people that if we don't offer compensation commensurate with what they get in the US people will just leave for the US.
There is some form of brain damage where even people who know how to code assume that because you can get a crud developer for $80k a year you should get an AI researcher for $150,000. It's nearly double after all.
There is a vast underestimation of how tedious & time-intensive these tax credit programs are when applying for them. A large company can do so because they can hire the people to solely go after them; A new startup (with a headcount that can fit in one hand) is too busy in actually keeping the business alive to pursue these programs, which often times come with conditions too arbitrary for startups to fulfill.
Yeah Canada just spends a ton of taxpayer money to create great institutions like U of T and Waterloo, so that their graduates can all go to Silicon Valley and make 2-3x the money.
Maybe the majority of Canadians think that having great higher education institutions and thr people who work in them is a good fit for their way of life, but having Silicon Valley companies and people making SV salaries around epuld make their lives worse? If so, this is great: Canadians don't want to live with the tech crowd, so they provide them with the skills so they can move elsewhere, make their dreams come tuee, and not bother the majority that don't want their presence.
NB some actual Canadians in this thread have voiced this possibility.
That makes zero sense, governments invest in education to improve their own country, not to train other countries work forces. If you read anything about Canada ever you will also know they have a bunch of policies to try and stop the brain drain and to recruit tech workers from abroad.
> That makes zero sense, governments invest in education to improve their own country
The idea is precisely that not having SV types around _improves_ the country, i.e. makes it closer to the preferences of Canadians.
And yes, having a foreign tech worker doing 9-to-5 in a large legacy company for thoroughly average salaries is very different from having a SV-style startup culture. There is very little process in Canada to make life difficult for the former style of company, and plenty of process to make operations difficult for the latter.
If not having SV folk improves Canada for Canadians, and hqving SV folks improves America for Americans, then this is just mutually beneficial trade. Efforts to try and stop brain drain still makes sense: it's even better if you can convince the citizens you trained to engage in the economic activity you actually want instead of economic activity that you find undesirable, but if you're unable to convince most of them, letting them go is still better than having them stay and engage in their undesirable behavior anyway.
Compare: if a large minority of Icelanders wanted to work for the Baby (which Iceland doesn't have), theb stopping the brain drain (convincing them to work in the Merchant Fleet) is the best outcome, but funneling them out (training them in merchant navigation and watching them join the Danish Navy) would still be preferable to them engaging in their desired behavior anyway (form their own pirate gang preying on the very Merchant Fleet you're trying to advantage).
> And yes, having a foreign tech worker doing 9-to-5 in a large legacy company for thoroughly average salaries is very different from having a SV-style startup culture
Immigrants coming into countries start companies at a disproportionate rate compared to natives.
Other than unquantifiable statements about what "Canadians want" everything you mentioned so far to justify this idea of "canada doesnt care if tech graduates leave" is falsifiable by data.
One last time, the claim is not that "Canada doesn't care". It's that it prefers it to the alternative of SV-style companies operating from Canada. Which is consistent both with data, facts on the ground (yes, Canada has laws and administrative processes designed to make SV-style startups difficult to start there, that's precisely what people complain about above!), and the comments of actual Canadians in this very thread.
You're welcome to present data falsifying the actual claim if you think you have it (instead of the "Canada doesn't care" straw man or misunderstanding that you repeat above, noting that so far you have not even refuted your own straw man by presenting any data).
> Maybe the majority of Canadians think that (...) having Silicon Valley companies and people making SV salaries around epuld (sic) make their lives worse
This is your claim that I engaged with. If your claim is true it literally means that Canadians do not care if those people leave, in fact they would prefer it. My argument is that you're wrong and Canada and it's people would rather have more tech workers and more tech companies.
I don't believe I'm misunderstanding so I think we should probably both give up at this point.
The problem is that Canada is basically a european country on the american continent - SV is possible in a place where you can have risk and reward. But also you might lose everything. In Canada, it is hard to become rich - so no worth trying, there is also less risk due to better social security and the base level is pretty decent. Would not be surprised if there are tons of regulations in Canada too (more than in USA).
There is a reason why there are not many startups in Europe - if you can have a decent life, secure job and a nice social security - no worth playing risky games. I would not be surprised if just sheer layoffs in USA led to more startups than in the whole Europe.
I don't tuink it implies that they don't care, it only implies that they find it preferable to one certain alternative (staying AND turning Vancouver into north-SF; the conjunction is load-bearing), and I think this much looks true and well-supported by the facts and revealed preferences. They're not willing to change the rules and procedures that people complain about here, and if you propose they do so, as many have, they say no to that explicitly.
But I agree that we should probably disengage, so (barring exceptional new insights on my end) will leave this as my last post in the thread. Thanks for the chat.
> Compare: if a large minority of Icelanders wanted to work for the Baby (which Iceland doesn't have), theb stopping the brain drain (convincing them to work in the Merchant Fleet) is the best outcome, but funneling them out (training them in merchant navigation and watching them join the Danish Navy) would still be preferable to them engaging in their desired behavior anyway (form their own pirate gang preying on the very Merchant Fleet you're trying to advantage).
I read this as if you'd be concerned of Canadians using their tech skills run malware groups, if Canada wouldn't let them leave and join SV companies.
I see why you'd read it that way, but it's meant as a metaphor, not an analogy, to help elucidate that a government may take steps to try and bring about their preferred outcome of retaining people, while not bringing about what is, from their perspective, even more undesirable outcome.
It's not perfect, but neither is anything else I couls.come up with. Take the following:
- Persia would prefer many trained accountants so that PersianAccountants, the shah's preferred supplier of accounting technology, can hire cheaply from a large talent pool.
- Ambitious, trained accountants leave for the U.S. to work on DisruptiveAccounting.io, earning big bucks and disrupting the U.S. accounting sector.
- If Persia changes the kingdom's procedures and incentives, the same accountants would stay and found DisruptiveAccounting East, instead of working for PersianAccountants. This would be strictly worse for the shah than letting them leave.
The problem is, if I were to use this metaphor, people would get hung up on the difference between democracy and monarchy (preferences of one autocrat vs. that of the majority) and most Americans just straught up do not understand why anybody, much less the majority, would prefer not disrupting the accounting sector.
I.e. if they don't understand what I'm saying about Canada not liking the third option, the metaphor falls flat: they also won't see why the shah doesn't like the third option.
So I had to look for a metaphor where the obvious alternative is undesirable to most Americans. Hence piracy. The problem is that there's another reading now (the software engineers will become criminals).
Do you have a metaphor that would avoid both issues? I'd love to hear it!
Canada's skilled immigration policy is amazing. It is attracting some of the best talent in the world. What it is not able to do is retain the talent and is just ending up as a stepping stone to the US.
All it needs to do is two things:
1. Provide tax deductions for rent and interest on home loans for new home buyers. 2. Reduce the average taxes to just slightly less than the US tax rate by 5-10% upto 500k.
Then watch the magic happen.
