“Toronto should be an AI hub” but Canadians are too nice to go for gold | Hacker News Reader

“Toronto should be an AI hub” but Canadians are too nice to go for gold

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12 pointsjasonwcfan17 comments

Canadians are considered nice but what drives that is a desperate fear of conflict or being perceived as 'negative'. It is debilitating and starkly clashes with some of the cultures that are now immigrating in to the country.

Business and employees here are universally perceived as suckers and ripe for fleecing which gives the country a poor reputation. The reality is that there are a lot of people here who are naive, but there are also many very skilled, experienced and capable people. Again culture clash.

Cost of living here is becoming almost impossible for the average person, with few places to go as most of the country does not have infrastructure to cope with those even there. There is a profound difference in politics and tolerance between cities and smaller town, so: yup, more culture clash.

While most of the world let inflation happen, Canada basically stalled inflation and placated citizens with cheap Chinese goods, and low interest rates. The result is that inflation is that Canadians are now priced out of their own country, inflation is accelerating and interest rates are creeping up.

In order to prop up profits and stave off economic collapse Canada brings in over 500,000 legal immigrants annually. The result is a massive strain on infrastructure which governments have been cost cutting for decades. Tensions are high and you can definitely see it in the moods and attitudes of people, especially on the roads.

Money parking and laundering are a huge problem here with little enforcement. Foreigners are buying property as fast as they can to aid in immigration applications and to hide their money from their own governments. The result is that property values have skyrocketed well beyond the reach of even tech sector workers.

Canada has some maturing to do and decisions to make like investing in the future rather than simply relying on population growth.

Canada's economy is pretend, driven by government spending instead of any real industry. Anything that grows remotely big enough to threaten our various oligopolies will get bought or regulated out of business anyway. If you look at our startup investments, it's all pretend, with most being led by BDC or CDPQ which are government agencies. It's just some bureaucrats playing a game to give money to some favored elites and rent seekers, not a serious economy.

From what I know shopify appears to be the exception to the rule and has grown to have a real international company in spite of being Canadian. So I belive Lütke is a credible voice in criticizing Canada's business culture.

Spot on! I did some work in R&D sector in Canada, like IRAP, OVEN, and even the military one, I would say it’s all theatre and barely pretend a PoC.

Here are my top points about Canada after having lived there for a decade:

1. They are not nice. They are timid. They can bitch behind your back.

2. Extreme fear of standing out. Extreme risk aversion. No startup pockets where investors are hanging out to invest a seed round in "just an idea".

3. No competition in the markets. Oligarchies rule the roost.

4. Low quality immigration from India gone crazy. If you are close to GTA, every single system will fail due to the massive amounts of low quality workers from India entering through fraudulent systems.

5. Everything is more expensive and lower quality than the US.

6. Healthcare is non existent unless you have a terminal disease. Nothing works.

So the vicious mix of low energy citizens with low quality immigrants makes Canada the most overrated country in the "developed world."

Agreed. I'm happy at least that this isn't lost on everybody.

Outside of the tech: one of the biggest misconceptions that Canadians are nice, while in fact we are on the top of the pyramid when in it comes to passive aggressive and covert behaviors.

Yes! I wrote something to that effect earlier but deleted it because I thought it was too negative. Much of my social circle (and my wife) are not Canadian, and I'd confidently say that almost nobody who moves here keeps the perception that we're nice for very long, probably not past the first visit to a restaurant.

Canadian here. No chance we have a globally competitive horse in this race. We have completed the transition to middling non-Germany European country culturally. People aspire to work 30 hours a week and have interesting hobbies, tech is scary. I say this in a value neutral way as someone based in Waterloo which appears to have almost no startups left.

It seems very hard for Canada to grow a strong local tech industry due to the ease of immigration to the US for all the local talent that wants to be involved in tech, plus additional regulatory barriers selling to eg the US, making Canada basically less competitive than less developed US states (less regulatory barriers selling within US market, no barrier to employees going to existing tech hubs).

So Canada can only rely on immigrants for these jobs, many of which are immigrating to Canada as a stepping stone to the US anyway, and which Canada seems better about actually letting them naturalize.

Few years ago we acquired something in Montreal related to AI, and it's interesting because when we tried to get the team to relocate to California many weren't interested. A lot of the key personel ended-up moving, but they still kept a significant presence in the city. Even today, when hiring they'll have engineers indicate early in the process they won't ever move (despite pretty much everyone considered for that office being eligible for an O-1 due to the nature of the work being done there).

What's interesting is we oppened a sattelite location in Toronto and it was a completely different experience. First thing people asked coming into interviews was about relocating to the US and if we could sponsor their visa. The demographics also skewed heavily toward recent immigrants to Canada.

The irony was, the Toronto location was opened specifically to house developers that simply couldn't pass the higher bar for US immigration.

That is interesting, most of my comment is motivated by exposure to the Toronto/Vancouver scenes and not Montreal. Maybe Montreal really is sufficiently different that my broad generalizations don’t apply.

I have worked with some Montreal based developers before who I think would never consider the US because they were native French speakers and preferred that in their day-to-day. Curious if there are other major factors

> because they were native French speakers and preferred that in their day-to-day.

That's what I assumed as well (lack of familiarity with the language or perceived bad language skills) until I realized that someone who I had assumed was a native English speaker was actually a native French speaker.

It would be tough to find an educated Quebecer that wasn't bilingual, though some may not want to speak English at work. I don't think language is a big issue overall though. Outside Toronto (maybe Vancouver too, I'm not familiar) many people are happy with their quality of life, family nearby, etc and are not motivated to move. Those that want to be elsewhere have already gone. Certainly in the maritimes and western provinces there are lots of people that feel at home and would only leave if they got really desperate. Toronto I think has a lot more people that tolerate it for the sake of their job, but would rather be somewhere else.

There's a lot of snowbird founders who bounce between Toronto and the US but most of the economic value they create ends up accruing to the US. It's pretty sad

All this shows is how ignorant Sam Altman is about Canada. Montréal is already the AI hub of Canada. Yoshua Bengio has done so much there for the local scene with MILA and Element AI. Tons of other companies have their Canadian AI teams in Montréal and not Toronto, including Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta.

It was Tobias Lütke making the comment. I'd suggest you read the other posts in this thread, many would disagree with you.

The actual title is: “The revolution has launched”: OpenAI’s Sam Altman charts the promise and peril of AI at Toronto event

The word "nice" is not found anywhere in the article, which is good because it's inaccurate

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