Canadian Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland visits GPTZero in Toronto
DPM Freeland’s visit underscores GPTZero’s AI detector as a tech innovator for Canada and the growing demand of responsible deployment of AI.
Toronto, Ontario has earned a reputation as a hub for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) globally and in Canada, thanks to the academic contributions of University of Toronto professors like Geoffrey Hinton, known as the “Godfather or AI,” and fellow collaborators like Ilya Sutskever to the field of machine learning.
Today, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland took the time to meet the GPTZero team at our office in downtown Toronto to celebrate fostering a native Canadian startup with home-grown engineering talent. The visit to a leading AI detector underscores recent concerns over the growing instances of AI “deepfakes”, including one of Freeland herself. The team discussed potential policy initiatives, including recommendations to strengthen the implementation of the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act, Canada’s AI leadership through the $2.4 billion package aimed at boosting research, innovation, and productivity, and the mitigation of AI risks, especially to protect against misuse of AI technologies.
GPTZero detects AI across multiple models, including ChatGPT, Llama, Gemini, and Claude, for more than 4 million global users. We are also currently training our custom model to combat the challenges posed by unregulated AI content generation. Our ML team in Toronto is staffed entirely by Canadian talent from major institutions including the University of Toronto, University of Waterloo, and the Mila - Quebec AI Institute. We are also proud to have Salakhutdinov and other key AI leaders as our investors and advisors.
GPTZero’s two Canadian co-founders built GPTZero into a profitable startup in their 20s. CEO Edward Tian, a Toronto-native and Princeton University graduate of computer science, developed the first version of GPTZero in 2022 while still in school. CTO Alex Cui joined him after he conducted his Masters in computer science and machine learning at University of Toronto.
GPTZero, headquartered in New York City with an office in Toronto, has raised $13M USD from high-profile Silicon Valley venture capital funds and investors like Jack Altman (Altman Capital) founder of Lattice and brother to Sam Altman of OpenAI (ChatGPT) fame, showing the high level of interest in Canadian AI talent.
As a nation of immigrants, Canada has also helped GPTZero bring top talent from places including Ukraine, where Freeland studied in 1988. Nazar Shmakto, a GPTZero engineer, previously led the ML research and development team as the second employee of Reface, a profitable a16z-backed generative media company in Ukraine. He immigrated to Canada after the conflict in Ukraine broke out.
We’re proud to have Deputy Prime Minister Freeland visit and see the impact of supporting technological innovation in Canada, and support Canada in developing a comprehensive, forward-thinking approach to mitigating the risks of misused AI technology.
