When Timnit Gebru was a student at Stanford University's prestigious Artificial Intelligence Lab, she ran a project that used Google Street View images of cars to determine the demographic makeup of towns and cities across the U.S. While the AI algorithms did a credible job of predicting income levels and political leanings in a given area, Gebru says her work was susceptible to bias -- racial, gender, socio-economic. She was also horrified by a ProPublica report that found a computer program widely used to predict whether a criminal will reoffend discriminated against people of colour. So this year, Gebru, 34, joined a Microsoft Corp. team called FATE -- for Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics in AI. The program was set up three years ago to ferret out biases that creep into AI data and can skew results.

Hinton was only technically an intern at Google. He arrived that summer for what he describes as a trial run -- he was hesitant to leave Toronto, where he has lived with his family for most of the past quarter-century -- and the short-term stint didn't have any other obvious job title. But in the manner of an intern, Hinton still seems chuffed to find himself quite where he is. On a recent morning at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, the first thing he did was enumerate the riches of one of many well-stocked "micro-kitchens." His job is to rove among one of the company's most highly valued teams, seeding the work underway with ideas.

Often they involve more than one. In December, Microsoft-owned Skype unveiled a demo version of a real-time translation service. As one caller speaks English or Spanish, the program renders it in the other language, in both spoken and written form. The U of T computer science department website hosts a version of a tool that many industry players are racing to perfect: upload a picture, and it generates a written caption. At a CIFAR talk in March, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, now a U of T professor, showed that the model is eerily accurate -- but not always.