Subscribers have voted Geoffrey Hinton as Canada’s innovation leader of 2023 in The Logic’s December survey, recognizing his work on AI safety and regulation. 

The British Canadian AI pioneer and University of Toronto researcher left Google this year, freeing himself to speak about what he sees as potentially catastrophic dangers of unchecked AI development. Hinton—who is also chief scientific adviser at Toronto’s Vector Institute, a cornerstone of Canada’s AI strategy—has since signed various open letters and appeared at high-profile events to make his case. 

When reached by The Logic, Hinton said he was surprised to hear that he had won for his role in the AI safety movement. “I think I get too much credit for it,” he said. Yet Hinton believes his campaign helped to bring the conversation on existential risk to the mainstream, and praised new AI standards that the Biden administration introduced in the U.S., saying “some aspects of it are good.” (He says he hasn’t yet gotten into the details of Canada’s voluntary AI code of conduct or proposed AI legislation.)

Hinton received about 17 per cent of votes in the survey, followed closely by Tobi Lütke of Shopify with roughly 15 per cent. Other runners-up were Louis Tremblay of Flo; Cohere co-founders Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang; and Innovation Minister François Philippe-Champagne. 

Subscribers said Hinton was the newsmaker with the “biggest impact globally” and, in the words of one respondent, has been “sounding the alarm for the well-being of all Canadians (and the world) instead of solely considering his bottom line.” 

Another wrote, “While there are many deserving candidates on this list, Geoffrey Hinton’s resignation from Google followed by his public campaign to mitigate the dangers of AI demonstrates leadership that transcends a single year or a single country.”

At this year’s Collision conference, Hinton gave a speech detailing potential harms such as the use of battle robots, and said existential risks are “not just science fiction.” He repeated the same message to The Logic in an interview, adding that he’s concerned about AI agents being used for election interference in the U.S. next year. He also said open-source development of large language models is “extremely dangerous, because it allows bad actors to fine-tune them for nefarious purposes like phishing.” 

Hinton pushed back against criticism that AI anxiety will be used to stifle competition. (Critics say costly safeguards would serve as a barrier to smaller players in the field.) He said he became a free agent so he wouldn’t be accused of speaking for Google, but that Google itself has been concerned about the dangers of AI beyond its business interests. “Their motive is not to prevent competition,” he said. “Their motive is to not destroy humanity.”

Readers who voted for Shopify’s Lütke cited his “customer obsession, scale and market dominance” and the scale of the company’s ambitions. In 2023, Lütke steered the company through an economic downturn, selling off its logistics business in the spring, reducing headcount by 20 per cent and returning to profitability in the third quarter. The year also saw the launch of new AI products at the company, such as an assistant for merchants called Sidekick and a chatbot for its Shop app. 

“The economic magnitude of [the] Shopify turnaround managed by Lükte dwarfs the mainly formative venture stage success of most other nominees,” one reader wrote. 

A few readers answered “Other,” nominating Wealthsimple CEO Michael Katchen; Senator Colin Deacon for his advocacy on financial-sector competition; and Andrew MacIsaac, CEO of Edmonton-based Applied Pharmaceutical Innovation, a life-sciences research non-profit.

Subscribers made predictions for the coming year and named the companies they would be watching most closely. Many said they will be following the AI space—with some suggesting irresponsible use will cause havoc—and several said they’ll be watching Toronto’s Cohere. One subscriber hoped to see where Cohere will “take their technology, and whether or not they choose the path of the Anthropic [and] OpenAI.” 

Others predicted an AI hype slowdown: “Generative AI will be humbled by regulatory blockage, and, most probably, less money in the system.”

Flo, Hopper, Deep Sky, Telus and Shopify were all cited by subscribers as companies to watch in the new year. “With a growing movement around ethical or conscientious consumerism in the wake of the Israel-Palestine conflict, many Canadians are seeking independent retailers whose values align with their own. It would be interesting to see how platforms like Shopify work with shifts in consumer-spending trends,” one wrote. 

One reader said quantum-computing firms such as D-Wave, 1QBit, Xanadu and Photonic have been “burning investor cash to date” and that they will be watching for downsizing or closures in the quantum space. 

Subscribers’ business priorities for the next year included growing their companies, maintaining profitability in a softening economy and responsibly incorporating AI products into their operations. 

Hinton’s priorities over the next year, meanwhile, range from practical to deeply philosophical. “I’m trying to retire. I haven’t been very successful at it,” he said. Instead, he’s become interested in whether AI can have subjective experiences, noting that the definition of subjective experiences in humans is often ill-defined. If AI can be said to have such experiences, “they’re much more like us than most people think,” he said. “All these hallucinations—people do that, too. People confabulate all the time.” 

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Methodology

The Logic emailed subscribers a private link to an online survey on Dec. 12, and the survey closed Dec. 15. Respondents’ identities were kept anonymous. Subscribers were asked “Who do you vote for as the Canadian tech leader of 2023?” with the following options:

• Shelby Austin, Arteria AI
• Janet Bannister, Staircase Ventures
• Yoshua Bengio, Mila
• François-Philippe Champagne, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada
• Aidan Gomez, Nick Frosst and Ivan Zhang, Cohere
• Geoffrey Hinton, University of Toronto
• Jordan Jacobs, Radical Ventures
• Rasha Katabi, Brim
• Fred Lalonde, Hopper and Deep Sky
• Jaime Leverton, Hut8
• Tobi Lütke, Shopify
• Dean Skurka, WonderFi
• Richard Sutton, Keen Technologies
• Louis Tremblay, Flo
• Greg Twinney, General Fusion
• Raquel Urtasun, Waabi
• Mike Wessinger, PointClickCare
• Marissa West, GM Canada
• Other (please specify):

They were also asked “What’s your top tech or business prediction for 2024?” and “What Canadian tech company will you be watching most closely in 2024, and why?” The final question was: “What is your company’s biggest priority in 2024?”