Trudeau gets his geek on at U of T, talking AI and Canada's future

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reaffirmed his nerd-in-chief reputation and outlined his government's vision to capitalize on Canada's early lead in artificial intelligence, or AI, during an appearance today at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management. Trudeau, a self-professed "geek," was a special guest at an annual business of AI conference hosted by Rotman's Creative Destruction Lab (CDL), a seed stage accelerator that specializes in building AI-powered startups. Quizzed on his AI knowledge, Trudeau compared the technology to playing chess against a computer that not only made moves based on cold hard calculations, but "leaps of instinct" that mimic how the human brain works. "I think we all understand, certainly in this room, the way the world is going," Trudeau said during a 20-minute conversation with Shivon Zilis of Tesla, Bloomberg Beta and Open AI. "So let's be part of it and help shape it, and let's make sure we're benefiting from the innovations – in both the designing of them and the applications and the jobs." In recent years, Canada – and Toronto in particular – has emerged as a hotbed of AI activity thanks in part to fundamental research performed by people like U of T's University Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton, who is known as the "godfather of deep learning" and works for Google, and U of T Associate Professor Raquel Urtasun, who is heading up Uber's self-driving car lab in Toronto.