Montreal

Silicon Valley is this monolith, this extractive monolith. But what this does is ignore a lot of the history of the development of generative AI and these deep generative models that goes back to Canada and Montreal and Toronto and NYU.

Peter Bauman, Digital Art in Q1 2025: AI Ethics, Agents

Speaking of 2014, the GAN origin story is now legendary, starting with a grad student send-off night out in Montreal on May 26th, 2014, which was only a few days before the NIPS 2014 deadline you were not planning on participating in.

Peter Bauman, Ian Goodfellow on Inventing GANs