Leho Nigul

Use it. Build it. Break it. 🛠️ I sat down with Luka Lamaj and the Microsoft Reactor to talk about the AI landscape, Canadian startups and how larger organizations are navigating their own AI transformations. Hang on to the end to hear what quote guides my work daily 💡 https://lnkd.in/gspwd_NW #AI #CanadianStartups #Founders #Innovation #TechOdyssey

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Watch the final part of the series "Crafting Applications with Cosmos DB" where Saranya Sriram and Sandeep S Nair unpack how surprisingly simple it is to make your app on Cosmos DB resilient in the case of a Datacenter failure. They also refer to a new preview feature that is a steal: Dynamic Autoscaling: https://lnkd.in/e74PXE4V #Autoscale Azure Cosmos DB #HighAvailability #NoSQL #DistributedData https://lnkd.in/e8he9PCy

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With the rise of Generative AI, it's never been more accessible for traditional software development teams to integrate machine learning into projects. We're hosting Kathryn Hume from RBC a leader in the field, who will provide a practical roadmap on: 🔹 Building ML Expertise: Learn how an Android development team successfully added machine learning skills to their toolkit. 🔹Empowering Your Team: Gain actionable tips for fostering ML knowledge within your software development team. 🔹 Knowledge Sharing at Scale: Discover techniques to share new domain knowledge across large teams effectively. 🔹 Real-World Challenges & Solutions: Learn valuable lessons from applying neural networks and overcoming obstacles in production for a massive 10 million user base. See the full abstract here: https://lnkd.in/gDCHCUha Toronto Machine Learning Society (TMLS) #MachineLearning #FullStackDevelopment

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Ai : Hunanity's greatest creation for Good and Bad. To secure ourself #zerotrustai In the journey, MS brings up VASA-1 will AI model which essentially spins a selfie image and turn it into a talking clip of you. All you have to do is upload a photo along with a voice note and let the AI model do the talking for you.

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🔹Origin: Upend is a Canadian startup that began as a summer project by Jeevan Arora from the University of Toronto School. 🔹Purpose: It aims to empower students and professionals with generative AI search capabilities, driven by a large selection of language models. 🔹Differentiation: Unlike its competitors, Upend offers a choice of 100 LLMs including both general-purpose and task-specific models. 🔹Features: - A gen AI search bar where users can select an LLM to answer queries related to work or everyday life. - The ability to provide grounded answers with citations, using a combination of web search and selected sources. - Support for more office file formats like Word and Excel for analysis. 🔹Pricing: Upend has a team package priced at $20 per month, aiming for a cost reduction of up to 90% for enterprise teams. They also offer a discounted student plan at $5 per month. 🔹Search approaches: Microsoft and Google are improving their search engines with AI while OpenAI plans a competitor. Upend focuses on affordability and a wide range of model options, positioning itself as a strong contender in the AI search engine market, while the others prioritize advanced AI for search accuracy. #llm #ai #search #model

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In #uWaterloo, We sat around a table, And asked each other to think of #startup ideas I chimed in, "Let's just make a dollar" Thinking that was a good start. We thought of outlandish ideas Crazy things that others had already done But we never made that dollar Turns out startups aren't about flash That new thing, Crazy idea It's about money. Can you make that dollar? Can you actually sell a product or a service? We just crossed 1000 payments processed. #ZeroInbox crossed 1000 payments. I'm flabbergasted. How did I go from struggling to make a single dollar To processing thousands? I started out this journey wanting to be an entrepreneur. Like anything it took time, and hard work. Some crazy crazy luck, and really really nice people. I made my first dollar not through #zeroinbox But through Facebook Marketplace! Selling gold I brought from a country I'd rather not name. Start with a dollar. A penny. #Startsomewhere, #startsomething!

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The #CTO Group, organized by Bijan Vaez, enables technology leaders in the Greater Vancouver Area to connect, collaborate, and share insights. As a not-for-profit and curated community, it fosters meaningful interactions and supports the growth of the local (and Canadian) technology ecosystem. The upcoming session on Nov. 20th will address an important topic on the intersection of AI and engineering productivity - and will offer engineering leaders a chance to explore balancing AI tools with human insights to future-proof teams and achieve meaningful results. #technologyleaders #techleadership #canadiantech #vancouvertech

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I'm excited that this week at the CAIAC - Canadian Artificial Intelligence Association conference George Wang will be presenting a paper Adaptive Learning Rates for Gradient Boosting Trees, based on work he did as an intern at Kinaxis last fall, in collaboration with Christopher Wang, Yunfei O., Behrouz Soleimani, PhD. There are 3 reasons this is both impressive and cool: 1. They combine heuristics, machine learning, and optimization to speed up the training for an important algorithm, Gradient Boosted Machines, widely used in both academia and industry. Faster training improves model performance. 2. This paper is just one of the many sparks of innovation in #artificialintelligence coming out of Kinaxis, where > 50% of our patents filed in the last several years have been in this space, because we continue to push the boundaries by inventing new solutions like this one to solve problems our customers face. We've been delivering AI to the market since 2018 and were the first to provide solutions powered by AI to address both demand and supply. We are rooted in Canada, which brought the world out of the last AI winter in 2012 when a team from the University of Toronto won the famous Imagenet competition by blowing the lid off previous results. Their submission was layers of neural networks called deep learning, which later became the foundation for the #generativeAI revolution we are seeing today. 3. We have an outstanding intern program in #machinelearning at Kinaxis, where interns work on real problems, guided by senior staff. As a testament to letting the students shine, when their paper was accepted they decided to have George present it. So check out the paper if you're at the conference, but if you miss the event you can't miss the fact that we are actively speaking and sparking on AI. In fact, just last week Chantal Bisson-Krol spoke in Edmonton at the #upperbound conference on AI-Powered Strategies for Resilient Supply Chains and I spoke at the Reuters Supply Chain USA event on Embedding AI in supply chain to deliver end-to-end value.

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Any talk about the growth of the AI chip business is usually driven by stories about how dominant Nvidia's market share is, or how companies like AMD and Intel are trying their best to catch up. So it might be easy to assume that there isn't a chance for startups to compete. But several Canadian startups are finding a place in the chip market, which has room for them to co-exist with and compliment what's being sold by the big multinationals (and, possibly, disrupt them). https://lnkd.in/gm_gs9m9

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Ever wondered how the technology behind some of India's most watched streaming events like the IPL works? Rohit Ramanand, New Relic GVP of Engineering for India, breaks it down in this article for TechGig 📺 🏏

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Researchers are developing AI that can bypass CAPTCHAs, those "I'm not a robot" tests we encounter online. 😂 __ 🚨514% ROI with AI and payback often within as short as 3 months. Read the full report here- https://lnkd.in/e5HRtbWp 👋 Join The AI Journal community! 🚀Subscribe to the newsletter: https://lnkd.in/ex9mu2hM 🔥 ‎Get daily AI updates on WhatsApp: https://lnkd.in/eav_GZ-J #Robots #FutureofSecurity #AIandUs #EvolvingRobots #CaptchaInnovation

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I for one am not particularly celebrating this decision. First I don’t really think it’s true that Google is a ‘monopoly’ the way telephone companies or rail systems are natural monopolies. Google is my 4-5th choice after Duckduckgo, and various AI engines such as Perplexity (which uses Bing), or just OpenAI (which uses Bing) or Anthropic. I think there are strong competitors in the area of search and Google’s market position has never been more vulnerable. Secondly I question why Canada is picking on Google, a foreign company, instead of looking VERY HARD at its own ingrown monopolistic industries. It also seems to me that this is bound to be an impotent and meaningless decision, which will not actually change anything. Google can take a little abuse (and that’s what this is). But it’s just politics, not a meaningful thing to go about destructively attacking foreign companies of our allies this way.

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We often talk about the strength of AI research in Montreal, but when I’m asked about what makes it special I like to answer: the culture. Our culture is clearly different from the culture of Silicon Valley, or New York, or London. Yet like all these places we have a critical mass of brilliant AI researchers. Is our culture better? I don’t know, but it’s different — and nurturing differences is important. When we get together we don’t talk about AGI or tech-based solutions to the world’s problems. We talk about fishing and board games and how AI is still pretty bad at navigating the difficult social situations we, humans, face every day. More generally, I feel a very humane undertone to every small group discussion with AI researchers we have here. It resonates with me a lot more than many of the discourses I hear from the Valley. Again, it’s not “the right culture”. It’s still dominated by a few ideas, coming from people that are far from representing the world’s diversity… but it’s a culture that craves the company of other cultures and that quality alone makes it a group I’m proud to be contributing to.

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The Cloud Intelligence Dashboards are one of the most cost effective ways to assemble an affordable FinOps toolchain...now with this new launch you can get single dashboard combined view into your AWS and Azure costs, something you used to have to pay for an expensive third party tool to obtain. Really looking forward to playing with this one!

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Do not trade Nvidia. Just keep the shares. That is what I am doing. The same is true for Eli Lilly. Nvidia is close to a 3 trillion market cap level, close to overtaking Apple in total valuation, and not far from Microsoft. The Bank of Canada just cut interest rates from 5.25 % to 4.75%. The ECB will follow. The TLT ETF looks like it is breaking out to the upside, as I predicted some days ago. Tough times for the Bears. India: Election results will force Modi to strengthen the consumption part of the economy to become more attractive for the middle class again. I added to existing positions in Makemytrip before the US market opened.

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As a huge fan of getting lost in a good story - my all-time favourite is One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) - and stories from Wattpad, I’m excited to share that Gayathri Srinivasan and Abhimanyu Anand are speaking at the Toronto Machine Learning Summit (TMLS 2024)! Finding the perfect story on a platform like Wattpad, with its massive library of stories, is all about smart recommendations. In this talk, we'll learn how Wattpad's recommendation system evolved to keep users engaged and hooked on great stories while balancing business goals. Here's what piqued my curiosity: ✅ How Wattpad uses recommendation systems at scale to connect readers with their next favourite story. ✅ The nitty-gritty challenges of building these systems, like data sparsity (not enough data!) and balancing multiple goals. ✅ Wattpad's ingenious solutions, including: - Probabilistic algorithms inspired by Reinforcement Learning - Custom-built graph neural networks specifically designed for recommendations. - Unique datasets they created to overcome data limitations. Get a unique peek into Wattpad and see their full abstract here: https://lnkd.in/gwSRjPjz #machinelearning #recommendationsystems #AI #Wattpad #TMLS2024 Toronto Machine Learning Society (TMLS)

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Call for demos: AI Tinkerers Toronto is looking for demos for the upcoming Spooky Botober - Haunted AI Meetup at Mozilla, on Oct. 30th. RSVP and get your demo proposal in, friends! https://lnkd.in/gW5-Bkin What is AI Tinkerers? Glad you asked. This is a monthly haunt for AI / ML wizards, and on the month of Botober, the meetup is taking on a darker twist as we delve (step by step!) into the powers of Haunted AI. We're not that interested in spooky AI models which have feasted on huge chunks of the internet, but rather those that have sipped delicately on hand-curated artisanal datasets. Join us to connect with fellow creators and share your haunted AI projects!

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“Who in the audience already thinks that AI is conscious?” I asked a Vancouver AI crowd last night. Check out the first 3 minutes of my presentation below. Full video on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/ge-dc3wa Thrilled to be able to have conversations about consciousness in AI. Thanks to Kris Krüg for the opportunity! #ConsciousAI #YouAreConscious #VancouverAI

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