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The University of Toronto’s Alumni Are Everywhere in the A.I. Boom

Geoffrey Hinton and a generation of Toronto-trained researchers helped build the models, labs and startups defining the A.I. era.

A significant portion of the global A.I. boom traces back to a single Canadian institution: the University of Toronto. Ranked first in Canada and among the top 17 universities worldwide for research and discovery, the university has become a key engine for top-tier talent, spawning more than 86 specialized A.I. and machine learning startups and supplying technologists behind OpenAI, Anthropic, Cohere and xAI. 

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Much of the momentum stems from Geoffrey Hinton, the 78-year-old computer scientist lauded as the “godfather of A.I.” He co-founded Toronto’s nonprofit research hub, the Vector Institute and taught at the university for most of the period between 1987 and 2014 before becoming an emeritus professor. Throughout the decades, Hinton maintained an unwavering commitment to neural networks, even when funding and broader interest in the technology dried up.

In 2012, Hinton created AlexNet, a breakthrough image classification neural network, with graduate students Alex Krizhevsky and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Its success turned Hinton’s lab into a premier recruiting ground for Big Tech.

The next year, Google beat Microsoft in........

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