Welcome to the AI Conspiracy: The 'Canadian Mafia' Behind Tech's Latest Craze

In the late '90s, Tomi Poutanen, a precocious computer whiz from Finland, hoped to do his dissertation on neural networks, a scientific method aimed at teaching computers to act and think like humans. As a student at the University of Toronto, it was a logical choice. Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of neural network research, taught and ran a research lab there. But instead of encouraging Poutanen, who went on to work at Yahoo and recently co-founded media startup Milq, one of his professors sent a stern warning about taking the academic path known as deep learning. "Smart scientists," his professor cautioned, "go there to see their careers end."