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Pier-Andre Cote is stepping up from the Israel-Premier Tech academy, becoming the sixth Canadian on the pro cycling team.

The 27-year-old from Gaspe, Que., will join the Israel-Premier Tech pro team in 2025 on a two-year contract. Other Canadians on the roster are Michael Woods, Guillaume Boivin, Derek Gee, Hugo Houle and Riley Pickrell.

Cote is coming off a fifth-place finish in the general classification at CRO Race, formerly known as the Tour of Croatia.

“Pier-Andre has been an exceptional teammate all season and has stepped up to the pro team from the academy on many occasions,” Israel-Premier Tech IPT general manager Kjell Carlstrom said in a statement. “His result at CRO Race was just another example of Pier-Andre stepping up and making the most of an opportunity given to him. There will be many more opportunities to come in the next two years and I have no doubt Pier-Andre will excel in our pro team.”

Cote previously finished 10th overall in the Baloise Belgium Tour and fifth in the one-day Druivenkoers-Overijse race in Belgium.

“The racing this year has been great,” Cote said. “I have done a good amount with the pros and it’s so motivating to be working towards a victory or a team performance with such great athletes. To be surrounded with top-level and all-around great guys is empowering and it has allowed me to get the best out of myself.”

Cote won the time trial at the Canadian championships in June and finished second behind Woods in the road race.

“I have been surprising myself in all sorts of terrain lately, so I’m hoping I can keep going down this road and just become a better all-rounder,” he said. “I’m hoping I can bring my versatility into the classics and find success there.

“As far as a main goal for the next years is concerned, if I had to narrow it down to just the one, I would like to keep heading towards becoming the best bike racer I can possibly be.”

Israel-Premier Tech has plenty of Canadian connections.

Canadian-Israeli entrepreneur Sylvan Adams is one of the owners. Canadians Jean Belanger, president and CEO of Premier Tech based in Rivière-du-Loup. Que., and Kevin Ham are also partners in the team.

Former star rider Steve Bauer is the head sports director while fellow Canadian Paulo Saldanha is the team’s performance director.

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This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 8, 2024

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

Geoffrey Hinton, a British-Canadian researcher known as the Godfather of AI whose findings helped spur technological revolution, has won the Nobel Prize in physics.

Hinton, who has spent most of his career at University of Toronto, was awarded the prize along with Princeton University researcher John Hopfield for their work laying the foundations that allow for machine learning using artificial neural networks.

“I’m flabbergasted. I had, no idea this would happen,” Hinton said when reached by the Nobel committee on the phone Tuesday.

Ellen Moons, a member of the committee at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said the two laureates “used fundamental concepts from statistical physics to design artificial neural networks that function as associative memories and find patterns in large data sets.”

She said such networks have been used to advance research in physics and “have also become part of our daily lives, for instance in facial recognition and language translation.”

While the committee honoured the science behind artificial intelligence, Moons also mentioned its flip side.

“While machine learning has enormous benefits, its rapid development has also raised concerns about our future,” she said.

“Collectively, humans carry the responsibility for using this new technology in a safe and ethical way for the greatest benefit of humankind.”

Hinton shares those concerns. He quit a role at Google so he could more freely speak about the dangers of the technology he helped create.

Hinton, now 76, said he continues to worry “about a number of possible bad consequences” of his machine learning work, “particularly the threat of these things getting out of control.”

Still, he said, he would do it all over again.

The physics prize carries a cash award of 11 million Swedish kronor, or about C$1.45 million, from a bequest left by the award’s creator, Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel.

In the 1980s, Hinton helped develop a technique known as backpropagation, which has been instrumental in training machines how to “learn.”

In 2012, his team at the University of Toronto won the prestigious ImageNet computer vision competition by designing a technique that could identify images far better than any of their competitors.

One of the team’s two graduate students, Ilya Sutskever, is the co-founder of OpenAI and considered one of the architects of the company’s hugely popular chatbot, ChatGPT.

Hinton said he uses the chatbot himself.

“Whenever I want to know the answer to anything, I just go and ask GPT4,” Hinton said at the Nobel announcement, referring to the chatbot’s latest model.

“I don’t totally trust it, because it can hallucinate, but on almost everything, it’s a not very good expert. And that’s very useful.”

Hinton and fellow AI scientists Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun won the 2018 Turing Award, computer science’s top prize.

Born in London, U.K., Hinton joined the U of T computer science department as a professor in 1987. He left in 1998 to found a computational neuroscience unit at University College London, but returned in 2001 and is now a professor emeritus.

In a statement, U of T president Meric Gertler said he was delighted by the news of Hinton’s prize.

“The U of T community is immensely proud of his historic accomplishment,” he said.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 8, 2024.

— With files from The Associated Press.

OTTAWA – Inflation and higher interest rates have eroded Canadians’ purchasing power since 2022, particularly for lower-income households, a new report from the parliamentary budget officer has found.

But wealthier households have seen their purchasing power rise thanks in big part to their investment income.

Over a longer time period — since the last quarter of 2019 — the average purchasing power of Canadian households rose by 21 per cent.

Government transfers, wage gains and net investment income supported the gain, said Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux in the report.

“However, this conclusion does not provide a full picture of the recent changes to purchasing power in Canada,” the report said. “In fact, it is widely accepted that inflation and the accompanying tightening of monetary policy have affected household purchasing power disproportionately, depending on income level.”

For the lower-income households, “small increases in income were not enough to counteract the effect of inflation on their purchasing power.”

On average during this period, households have experienced price increases of about 15 per cent on a typical “basket” of goods and services, the report said.

Spending on food, shelter and transportation accounted for more than three-quarters of inflation, though these categories made up less than half of the 2019 consumption bundle.

Inflation began heating up in 2021 as raw material costs and supply chain disruptions put pressure on prices, the report noted.

As inflation sharply accelerated in 2022, household purchasing power declined. Meanwhile, the Bank of Canada rapidly increased its key interest rate from its pandemic-era lows, bringing it up to five per cent by mid-2023 before hitting pause.

The Consumer Price Index reached an all-time high of 8.1 per cent in June 2022, and has slowed ever since under the weight of rate hikes by the Bank of Canada.

While higher interest rates weighed on many households as the cost of their mortgage payments rose, it also helped boost investment income, the report said.

The investment income of the wealthiest 20 per cent of households grew faster than their interest payments, leading to a net increase in income over inflation and boosting their purchasing power in 2023.

For other households, interest payment increases on average were higher than their investment income last year.

As a result, households in the third and fourth quintiles saw their purchasing power stagnate, while the lowest-income households saw their power deteriorate.

“In summary, the purchasing power of most households remained higher in the first quarter of 2024 than in the last quarter of 2019,” the report said.

“However, since 2022, rising inflation and tighter monetary policy have eroded purchasing power, particularly among lower-income households.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 8, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.