Kanchana Padmanabhan

Excited to be back at Tech Thursdays next week, co-hosted with CFA Society Calgary and YYC Data Society, for a discussion on the impact of #AI & #Cloud in investment management! In this session we will be diving into questions like: 👉 What's the impact of AI on Macro Investment decisions? 👉 Will AI revolutionize the game, or will changes be gradual? 👉 Are traditional portfolio managers still pivotal, or is the future dominated by quantitative methods? 👉 How do we think about proprietary data sets through AI and how they are being monetized? 👉 And most importantly.... Where are the limits of AI? And where does AI not work? I'll be sharing the stage with some of the top professionals in their fields Julian Klymochko, Wish Bakshi, Benjamin Reeves and Chad Langager!

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Canada's AI paradox is costing us billions: Canada leads the G7 in AI talent, yet 86% of our businesses aren't even considering AI adoption... Working in AI and data, I see this disconnect daily. Yes, we have $2.4B in government support, but money alone won't solve our adoption problem. The real roadblocks I'm seeing: • Setup costs are too high for many businesses (e.g. CAPEX versus OPEX) • Companies worry about keeping data safe (e.g. over-classification of documents due to "better safe than sorry" culture) • Not enough trained workers • Business leaders aren't sure they can trust AI Canadian banks are showing how it's done - they're using AI better than most banks worldwide. But other industries need to catch up if Canada wants to stay competitive. Waiting comes at a cost!!! AI could make Canadian businesses 1-6% more productive in the next 10 years. That's a lot of missed opportunities. Share your firsthand experiences: What's stopping your organization from embracing AI? Let's identify concrete solutions. https://lnkd.in/eAdB5evJ https://lnkd.in/ehvtjRHf

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🎙️ Exploring the Human Element in AI Integration! In this episode of #BehindtheGrowth, I had the pleasure of chatting with Kathryn Hume, VP of Digital Channels Technology at RBC, about the evolving relationship between humanities and technology in the realm of AI. Kathryn shared some fascinating insights inspired by a conversation with her mom, a successful female CEO. They discussed the fundamental importance of human connection, emphasizing that no matter how advanced technology becomes, humans will always seek meaningful connections with one another. As leaders, it's our responsibility to ensure that our fellow humans lead fulfilling lives, regardless of the advancements in AI. This conversation truly highlighted the crucial role of human empathy and connection in shaping the future of AI. As we continue to innovate and integrate AI into various industries, let's remember the significance of maintaining our human touch. Tune in for an enlightening discussion on the intersection of humanity and technology and gain valuable insights into the future of AI. 🎧 Watch the full video for more insights! 🔗 Find it using the links below:      Website: https://lnkd.in/g8ghDYaj      YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gU7fse3s       Apple: https://lnkd.in/gz7P_wbj     Spotify: https://lnkd.in/gnpBTsMT 

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🚨 One-third of AI projects just for show #Relief! And Kudos! Calgary Public Library 📈 How To Make Decisions Like A Billionaire My weekly Tech news round-up of news you can use: 🚨 One-third of AI projects just for show 💡 The main purpose of AI initiatives is to show investors and stakeholders their organization is doing something with AI. However, “You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.” AI is happening, and businesses need to embrace it. Here’s how: 👇 https://lnkd.in/ghrkEUz9 #Relief! And Kudos! No personal data leaked in Calgary Public Library cybersecurity attack 🎉 👏 Kudos to Calgary Public Library's cybersecurity team and incident response protocols that blocked a recent cyber attack. Ransomware attacks are on the rise—stay vigilant, folks! 🔐 https://lnkd.in/gpHGap8C 📈 How To Make Decisions Like A Billionaire These well-known billionaires prove that a boring, principle-driven approach can lead to massive success. 💼 Ray Dalio has detailed playbooks guiding every decision, from investing to hiring. 📊 Bill Gates says measure everything: "If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it.” ⏰ Warren Buffett lives by a strict routine. Choose method over madness. https://lnkd.in/gczGwq_s

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Last week Asian founders did... 🚀 Aditya Rajagopal PhD launched nCompass Technologies Inc.'s first service, an API that supports any open-source, fine-tuned, or custom LLM with no rate limits while maintaining a high QoS. 🚀 Danielle J. Yoesep and Shuying Zhang launched Verse Therapy (YC W24), a healthcare platform to connect patients with speech therapists, and empower speech therapists to start their own practices. 🚀 Vidy Thatte launched Webclips, a no-code platform to build mobile apps on your phone. 🚀 Stephen Chau and Mike Chu launched Cove, a new type of collaborative AI that directly edits content with you, learns from your content, proactively suggests next steps, and more. 💸 Ankur Goyal raised a $36M Series A for Braintrust, an end-to-end platform for building AI applications which focuses on making LLM software development robust and iterative. 💸 Jeff Chang raised a $50M Series B for Rad AI, an AI workflow platform enabling radiologists to save time, reduce burnout, and improve patient care. 💸 Hamzah Chaudhary raised an $11M Series A for Lightdash, a platform which turns business data into a self-serve full-stack BI platform. 💸 Annie Liao 🇦🇺 raised a $1.75M Pre-Seed round for Build Club, an AI e-learning platform empowering builders through hands-on, gamified AI education. 🎙️ Jason Patel, founder of OpenForge, shares his journey building a an AI-powered email sales tool on AI Innovaters with Rob May 🎙️ Arvind Jain, co-founder of Rubrik and Glean, talks about Glean and the future of AI-work on the Venture with Grace podcast Links to the podcasts in the comments ⬇️

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Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez says that #1 blocker for Enterprise GenAI use cases is data privacy and #2 blocker is the cost (implies ROI). He also explained what Canadian AI startup, Cohere does and how they make money. A must watch for anyone who is interested in Enterprise GenAI use cases. He also said that GenAI fear mongering is cheap ways to get attention (I am paraphrasing, he didn’t use the word cheap). Quite a bit commentary on Google Cloud AI developments as well. Other mentions Oracle and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Aidan comes across as a mature tech leader for his young age. He sounds more realistic and less me too, in GenAI hyped era. Aidan was talking to CNBC’s Steve Kovach. https://lnkd.in/g36SFYfn ____________________ Last month, Cohere has raised $450 million in funding from returning investors such as Nvidia and Salesforce Ventures, as well as new investors including Cisco and Canadian pension fund PSP Investments cc David Vellante David Linthicum John Furrier Ron Miller Shelly DeMotte Kramer Robert Hof

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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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2024 in Review: This was a year of serious building for Human Feedback Foundation with AI Tinkerers Toronto. We hosted regular meetups packed with hands-on demos. Think less talk, more action. Accenture, Drive Capital, Cerebras, Shopify, Mozilla, and others stepped up as key sponsors. Their support fuels our community. We saw everything from AI Summer Socials to Spooky Botober at Mozilla HQ. Toronto’s demo scene was strong. We've seen so many great demos! "Toybox" by Jonathan Talmi made AI image generation and prompt engineering more playful and fun. Mike Walmsley presented “Zoobot,” using AI for galaxy analysis. Ali Asaria's Transformer Lab demo on how to do local LLM fine-tuning without coding, using LoRA and RLHF. These are just a few examples of the practical and fun AI being built here. Special thank you for your demos Krish Perumal, Andrew Marble, Dilek Karasoy, Sahand Sojoodi, Nick Fox-Gieg, and Ara Ghukasyan, at the very first event we've hosted. Our meetup attendees say, “Networking is the main reason I come,” and love the “electric” energy in the room. That’s what we aim for. Globally, the AI Tinkerers network now stands at 62 cities! Impressive growth. Looking ahead, we’re excited for 2025. Being part of this global AI builder community is awesome. Add yourself to the list if you haven't yet, cause the next event is on January 30th! https://lnkd.in/gfAxxkcE We'll announce it soon.

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From our incredible SandboxAQ advisor Fei-Fei Li at NeurIPS today in Vancouver: AI will NOT replace human capabilities, instead it will augment human capabilities. #ai

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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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Stanford University recently published the 2023 AI Vibrancy research. This outlines how 36 countries stack up in terms of AI adoption. All available to the public. #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #LLM #Palantir #OpenAI Do you know the leading metric that Canada stands out for? https://lnkd.in/eyEE54zJ

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At a Generative AI thought leadership dinner with other CTOs in NYC today and some interesting trends are emerging: * a consensus that LLMs are converging on a general set of features and basically comparable performance * a consensus that an org's data pipelines will matter more than the LLM chosen * and a group of people who read the TOS that are really scares about what these LLMs will do with access to all your data. Lastly, my prediction: the work of tech is moving from the keyboard to the whiteboard. Ai as microservice means structuring your data, thinking with ai, and chaining ai agents will supercharge your career and your cause -- but only if social change orgs platform their data. In my study of polymaths, Charles Babbage designed the basic idea for a unit of computing being something that takes an input, does something to it and gives an output -- the so called Babbage difference engine. In a real way, GenAI is approaching a world where chaining inputs ala a babbage difference engine is accessible to all. This can be an awesome opportunity if we get Non profits to work together!

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#AI , #Ethics and #Sustainability have never been as interconnected as today! Looking forward to this discussion tomorrow with amazing Dr. Sasha Luccioni and moderated by Monish Gandhi Come say hello if you are around Toronto Machine Learning Society (TMLS) #TMLS2024

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Learn about AI with me 🤖 This week in my UVic Applications of AI in Business class, we explored how machines learn. But what does machine learning actually mean? 3 Types of Machine Learning: 1. Supervised: Machines learn from labeled data. Think training a model with tons of labeled images of dogs so they can recognize them in a crowd 2. Unsupervised: Machines identify patterns in unlabeled data, like analyzing sales data to find customer types  3. Reinforcement: Machines learn through trial and error with a reward system We also chatted about deep learning, which is a subset of ML modeled after the human brain, and layers complex machine learning algorithms (called neural networks) to process data, like recognizing images 🧠 Challenges? Lack of transparency and explainability. An AI predicting tuberculosis linked its results to the manufacture date of the X-ray machine instead of the content of the patients’ scans, assuming older X-rays machines meant higher poverty and thus higher TB rates 🏥🔍. These complex machine learning programs could also create a barrier for smaller businesses who might not have crazy amounts of perfectly structured and labeled data, which has me thinking about how to make these exciting new technologies equally accessible. On that note, Trudeau was recently talking about democratizing AI in a recent podcast with the New York Times (below!). #AIInBusiness #MachineLearning #DeepLearning #TechInnovation https://lnkd.in/g_RiwQZg

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I had the opportunity to attend the Toronto Machine Learning Society (TMLS) Summit. Sharing my learnings and observations: ➡ RAG RAG RAG ... and did I say RAG? Contextual Semantic Search is how Enterprises are unlocking the value of GenAI ➡ Evaluating the accuracy and reliability of LLMs is becoming increasingly important. Frameworks such as RAGAS.io and TruEra are there to help! 🏁 Hamza Farooq hosted an incredibly interactive session covering the LLM ecosystem and what to take into account for GenAI applications. 🆕 Royal Sequeira Aslesha Pokhrel Christopher Tee delivered a hands-on workshop covering DSPy to optimize your prompts like a software engineer. First interaction with this framework and I really liked how modular it is and felt like Object Oriented Programming for LLMs. 🔗 Yizhi Yin covered Graph RAG and helped us build a personalized product recommendation engine. Pretty cool. 🧠 Ehsan Amjadian talked about lessons learned from building a RAG solution for the financial industry. Very insightful. I need to look into beyond just my chunking strategy 🤓 🙏 Thank you to David Scharbach and the entire organization committee for a great event. The sessions were incredibly useful, relevant and dynamic. I took so many notes and learned directly from AI/ML leaders building in the real world. Looking forward to learning more from this amazing community and contributing to future events! #ML #GenAI #AI #Events #Toronto #summit

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