Stephen Cooper

Claude 3.5 Sonnet by Anthropic at CodeNinja Inc. | Radically cutting the cost of Custom Software for our partners | 100X Workplace Today, I spoke to Adil and asked him about Claude 3.5, and GitHub Copilot, and specifically my question was how a software developer should think about AI pair programmer for any of the coding tasks. As Adil was building a solution design with Claude and he is also a big proponent of GitHub Copilot, he said, "In front of Claude, GitHub Copilot is elementary. You just have to learn the right prompts—a flow of how you want to build the product, some prioritizations of the key features, and there you go. I have not seen anything like this" One of the questions we ask to ourselves is how we can reduce the cost of software development for our customers. As a software services and AI company, the true benefit of these pair programmers to our customers is if we lower the cost of planning, building, deploying, and maintaining software by orders of magnitude. It turns out Claude is not just a cost-effective way to ship software—it's a better software through Claude. Adil and I are doing a podcast on this; we will share the details soon. At CodeNinja, we are helping some of the world's most important businesses and institutes solve their highest priority problems using software, AI, and our globally distributed teams of Ai engineers. We believe that to serve the most demanding customers in global markets, we need to build a 100X workplace where every member of the CodeNinja workforce is insanely productive and focused on things that truly matter for our partners and customers. #technology #Ai #innovation

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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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As the founder of tabii.cloud, I’ve learned a thing or two about staying laser-focused. 🎯 We’re all about one thing: providing private and secure SOCKS proxies for seamless access to the Canadian internet. 🇨🇦 In my previous startup gig, we tried to juggle too many balls at once. The result? Thrash—not the cool kind you find in skate parks, but the chaotic, work-sanity-draining kind. 🌀 The Power of Singular Purpose: Imagine a tightrope walker. Their entire existence hinges on that thin line. Similarly, when your startup zeroes in on a single product, it’s like finding your balance. 🎪 The Thrill of Mastery: Becoming the go-to in your niche is exhilarating. It’s not about being a jack-of-all-trades; it’s about being the ace. 🃏 Customer Love: When you pour heart and soul into one thing, your users feel it. They become loyal fans, spreading the word like confetti. 🎉 Peace Amid Chaos: Remember that startup chaos? Well, focus is your lifeboat. It keeps you afloat when the waves get wild. 🌊 So, embrace the Zen of Singularity and unleash a cascade of positive outcomes. 🙏 #StayFocused #TabiiCloud #StartupLife #TorontoTech

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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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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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Recently I interviewed Nathaniel Simard, founder & CEO of Tracel Technologies and inventor of the burn ML framework: Jan: Nathaniel, we're excited to have you as our guest today! To kick off our conversation, could you please introduce yourself and share a bit about your background and what got you into ML? Nathaniel: Sure, I'm the creator of Burn, a deep learning framework written in Rust, and the founder of Tracel AI. I started coding in the first year of university, where I was studying mechanical engineering, but I quickly switched to software engineering after, since I instantly fell in love with programming. Then I explored different facets of the field from backend to frontend development, and I decided to start my career as a consultant focused on software quality. After some time, I wanted to go deeper into AI, since I was always interested in the process of learning, so I enrolled for a master's degree at MILA. J: According to Github you started to work on burn in summer 2022. Since then has already earned over 7000 stars on GH. What was your initial motivation to develop a new ML framework? N: I always had a side project going on, for fun mostly and to learn new things. I wanted to explore asynchronous and sparse neural network architectures, where each sub-network can learn and interact with other sub-networks asynchronously and independently. I wasn't able to actually create something useful because I needed fine control over the gradients and the concurrency primitives, which is not easily done with Python and PyTorch. At the same time, I was working on machine translation models at my current job, and it was quite painful to put models into production. I decided to switch my side project to a new deep learning framework, with more flexibility regarding gradients and concurrency primitives as well as being more reliable and easier to deploy on any system. J: Amazing to see that this was born out of a side project! I feel the struggle with concurrency in Python and this is something where Rust really shines. What are some of the other key features that makes burn special? N: I think there are two things that really set Burn apart. First, almost all neural network structures are generic over the backend. The goal is that you can ship your model with almost no dependency, and anybody can run it on their hardware with the most appropriate backend, even embedded devices without an operating system. Second, Burn really tries to push the boundaries of what is possible in terms of performance and flexibility. It offers a fully eager API, but also operation fusion and other optimizations that are normally only found in static graph frameworks. The objective is that you don't have to choose between portability, flexibility, and performance; you can have it all! To read the rest of the interview with Nathaniel's plans for burn & trends in AI here: https://lnkd.in/dKv9ztMm #ml #ai

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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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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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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 just released the April edition of my AI & the Web newsletter. Nathaniel Simard, founder & CEO of Tracel Technologies and inventor of the burn ML framework, spoke with me about how he got into ML, burn, Tracel and the future of AI. WebGPU, the successor of WebGL, will soon also be supported in Firefox and Safari. Small, powerful LLMs running right in the browser is not a distant future, but are the next big thing in cost-effective and privacy-friendly AI. Google is working hard on better WASM support in the browser that makes ML models running fast even on low-end devices without GPU. With Llama 3 by AI at Meta and Phi 3 by Microsoft AI we got some exciting new, small modells. Llama 3 was already ported to run in the browser and we'll see Phi 3 soon as well. MusicGen has been ported to the browser in transformers.js by Hugging Face engineers and developed an online Jukebox running right in the browser. #webgpu #webml #ai #ml #llama3 #wasm https://lnkd.in/drJCY7Ew

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The Scientific Research and Experimental Development (SR&ED) tax incentive is one of Canada's most powerful tools for fostering tech innovation - enabling businesses to recoup up to 65% of their R&D salary costs. Here's the troubling reality though: While this program distributes ~$4B annually to 20,000 businesses, an unnecessary "SR&ED consulting industry" has emerged that extracts $400M-800M from these funds. Why? These consultants capitalize on companies' fears about complex paperwork, despite the fact that 94% of SR&ED applications are approved. They charge 10-20% of the tax credit simply to complete forms. Let that sink in: Nearly a billion dollars meant for Canadian innovation is instead diverted to middlemen who add minimal value. At Publicus, we're passionate about streamlining government processes through automation. While SR&ED reform isn't our current focus, we believe in raising awareness about the systemic, government-related inefficiencies that hold back Canadian tech companies. #CanadaTech #GovTech #Grants #Innovation

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What drives developers to deliver good-quality code? 👨‍💻 Today's guest believes it's all about ownership & autonomy! 💪 Meet Paul Lewis, CTO at Pythian & an active board member at the Schulich School of Business - York University, in #ep44 of the groCTO podcast where he shares his insights on building teams from scratch by leveraging communication & innovation 🎙 Paul's team-building techniques are practical & derived from an extensive experience of more than 30 years! What are your go-to methods for communicating better and building amazing teams? Share your thoughts below! ✍ Find links to the full episode in the comments ✨ Meanwhile, check out the sneak peek of our discussion below. Key Takeaways 👇 💟 Establishing a collaborative team culture ✅ Hiring & talent acquisition strategy 💬 Processes & communication in growing teams 🤖 Aligning tech innovation with business requirements groCTO aims to bring the best tech leaders across the globe to empower you with their practical experiences and learnings in the realm of engineering management and leadership 🌍 Do let us know in the comments below what you’d like to see more of in our future podcast episodes 😁 #engineeringmanager #engineeringleadership #engineeringmanagement #techleadership #typo #developerexperience #devex #podcast #techpodcast #product #dora #SPACEframework #engineeringmetrics #sdlc #developer #innovation #acquisition #startups #groCTOPodcast #groCTO #groCTOCommunity #teambuilding #communication

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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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Here are more details about my idea. Would love to hear your feedback! #AI #Innovation Vancouver AI Space

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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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This week, OpenAI announced its RealTime API for voice with conversational abilities. Couldn't be prouder of our team at TransforML Platforms Inc led by Ali Ahmed who've developed similar technology that works at up to 10x lower costs with better interruption capabilities, and most importantly is model agnostic! If you're interested in seeing a demo and figuring out how you might be able to integrate it with your own customer-facing efforts, feel free to reach out! In the mean time, here is a demo to spurt the brain-cells! #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #Technology #Digitization

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Machine Learning (ML) should be focused firmly on making a positive business impact, but many BI / Data Analysts need to start by understanding what impact ML can have on their business data. Examples 👇👇👇

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