Join University Professor Emeritus and Nobel Prize winner, Geoffrey Hinton for a candid conversation with Jordan Jacobs, Managing Partner & Co-Founder of Radical Ventures, moderated by Ivan Semeniuk, Award Winning Journalist at The Globe and Mail, on the opportunities, challenges, and obligations when building a new venture leveraging the power of artificial intelligence.

Artificial intelligence adoption has quickly captured the public imagination and sparked important debates around the world. Governments, business leaders and global citizens are having critical conversations about if and how AI should be regulated and what guardrails need to be in place to protect society. Advocates on both sides argue about both the enormous potential and risks of this disruptive technology and the rapid emergence of generative AI and large language models (LLMs) has accelerated this debate.

The fireside chat will cover a broad range of topics, including:

• Canada’s place in the AI revolution

• Do LLMs understand language in the same way as we do?

• Reasons for optimism

• Risks of AI

• Is digital intelligence just better than analog intelligence?

This event will take place as part of True Blue Impact Day on March 6th during University of Toronto Entrepreneurship Week 2025.

Speakers

Professor Geoffrey Hinton

Professor Geoffrey Hinton, 2024 Nobel Laureate in Physics and the “Godfather of AI,” is internationally renowned as a pioneer in the field of deep learning as a mode of artificial intelligence. With John J. Hopfield, he received the Nobel Prize in Physics "for foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks,” including his invention of the Boltzmann machine using statistical physics techniques. In 2018, he received the Association for Computing Machinery's A.M. Turing Award, often called the “Nobel Prize in Computing,” alongside Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun “for conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.” 

Hinton received his BA in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cambridge in 1970 and his PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1978. After completing postdoctoral work at Sussex University and the University of California San Diego, he spent five years as a faculty member in the Computer Science department at Carnegie Mellon University. He then became a fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and moved to the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto in 1987. He spent three years from 1998 until 2001 setting up the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit at University College London and then returned to the University of Toronto, where he was named a University Professor in 2006 and is now University Professor Emeritus. Since 2017, Hinton has been Chief Scientific Advisor at the Vector Institute in Toronto.

Hinton was one of the researchers who introduced the backpropagation algorithm and the first to use backpropagation for learning word embeddings. His other contributions to neural network research include Boltzmann machines, distributed representations, time-delay neural nets, mixtures of experts, variational learning and deep learning. His research group in Toronto made major breakthroughs in deep learning that revolutionized speech recognition and object classification.

Jordan Jacobs

Jordan Jacobs is Managing Partner and co-founder of Radical Ventures. Before Radical, Jordan co-founded Layer 6 AI and was co-CEO prior to its acquisition by TD Bank Group where he joined as Chief AI Officer (Business & Strategy).

Jordan is also a founder of the Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Toronto, a concept he devised with Radical Ventures and Layer 6 co-founder Tomi Poutanen and Professor Geoffrey Hinton. Jordan is a Director of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), which administers on behalf of the Government of Canada the world’s first national AI strategy, which Jordan helped author. Jordan is also a member of the University of Waterloo President’s International Advisory Board, a Director of Tennis Canada, and has been selected as one of Toronto’s 50 Most Influential People.

Jordan started his career as a lawyer and received his JD from Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto.

Ivan Semeniuk

Ivan Semeniuk reports on science for Canada’s national newspaper, The Globe and Mail.  An award-winning journalist,  he has informed Canadians about areas as diverse as space exploration, biomedical research and climate change for over 25 years. Prior to joining The Globe and Mail in 2013, he was the Washington-based chief of correspondents for the journal Nature, U.S. bureau chief for New Scientist magazine and a producer and columnist with Discovery Channel’s Daily Planet.