Scott Moe’s Saskatchewan Party promises to extend diabetes coverage if re-elected

TORONTO – Siskinds LLP says a $70.25 million class-action settlement has been reached with TD Asset Management over commissions paid to discount brokers.

The law firm says the class action members alleged that since discount brokers aren’t allowed to provide investment advice, investors receive no value for the trailing commissions they pay to such brokers.

It says trailing commissions paid on mutual funds are meant to compensate mutual fund dealers for investment advice they provide to investors.

Siskinds says it has filed proposed class actions against several mutual fund managers that have discount brokers, which along with TD Direct Investing, also includes RBC Direct Investing, BMO InvestorLine, CIBC Investor’s Edge, Scotia iTRADE and National Bank Direct Brokerage.

The proposed settlement with TD covers anyone who held units of a TD mutual fund trust through a discount broker on Sept. 11, 2024 or earlier.

TD did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the settlement, which is still subject to approval by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 9, 2024.

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The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

TORONTO – The research that won Geoffrey Hinton a Nobel Prize for physics was the product of plenty of work carried out before artificial intelligence was the buzzword it is today.

The British-Canadian computer scientist and other AI pioneers say his now-celebrated discoveries dating back to the 1980s attracted doubters and a fraction of the attention AI sees today.

“It was a lot of fun doing the research but it was slightly annoying that many people — in fact, most people in the field of AI — said that neural networks would never work,” Hinton recalled during a Tuesday evening press conference to discuss the Nobel honour he was given that morning.

Neural networks are models that mimic the human brain by recognizing patterns and making decisions based on data.

Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, was awarded the Nobel Prize for uncovering a method that independently discovers properties in data and is seen as foundational for the large neural networks AI relies on.

His co-laureate John Hopfield, a Princeton University researcher, was honoured for advancing AI by creating a key structure that can store and reconstruct information.

In the heyday of their research, Hinton remembers there being plenty of skeptics.

“They were very confident that these things were just a waste of time and we would never be able to learn complicated things like, for example, understanding natural language using neural networks and they were wrong.”

Hinton persevered, continuing his research even when the scientific community was staring down so-called “AI winters,” said Elissa Strome, executive director of Pan-Canadian AI strategy at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. (Hinton became involved with the organization in 1987 and remains an advisor.)

AI winters are quiet periods, when interest, development and funding for research around the technology has typically slowed.

“We had a couple of those where the hype of AI wasn’t really being lived up to with the science,” Strome said.

Yoshua Bengio, a fellow Canadian computer scientist who won the A.M. Turing Award with Hinton and French-American Yan LeCun in 2018, said it took about two decades for the perception of neural networks to shift.

The wait wasn’t easy for Hinton.

“He was frustrated that his ideas were kind of rejected by the mainstream,” Bengio said in an interview.

He thinks it took so long for public perception to swing in favour of Hinton’s work because schools of thought can be really entrenched and difficult to change, even in the scientific community.

“For people who are thinking out of the box and maybe in ways that contradict the accepted beliefs, it could be a challenge and it has been for him and it has been for me,” Bengio said.

While accolades have since flowed in for Hinton, Strome said one of the most pivotal moments for his research came on Sept. 30, 2012, when he and a group of researchers won the ImageNet computer vision competition.

The contest centred around a massive database of images. Entrants were challenged to find a machine learning algorithm able to correctly identify each image.

Hinton’s team entered with technology they called AlexNet after one of the members, Alex Krizhevsky.

“They blew all the other sort of older ways of doing machine learning out of the water,” Strome said, creating a “monumental moment.”

A year later, Hinton, Krizhevsky and their teammate and eventual OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever sold their neural network startup DNNresearch Inc. to Google.

Hinton now has an almost-celebrity like status among the technology community that was only bolstered by his Nobel win. On recent visits to tech conferences in Toronto, there’s never an empty seat in the room and the talks he gives generate regular headlines.

Strome sees Hinton’s Nobel win, which even the computer scientist was surprised by, as a reminder that “the next breakthroughs are somewhere on the horizon but we don’t always know what they’re going to be.”

These days, much of the hype around AI has been linked back to U.S. tech company OpenAI launching AI chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022. The release prompted a flood of global companies to get serious about AI and release more products and services embedded with the technology.

At 76, Hinton said he doesn’t plan to do much more “frontier research” and will send his half of the 11 million Swedish kronor (about C$1.45 million) Nobel Prize to charity.

“I believe I’m going to spend my time advocating for people to work on safety,” he said.

Hinton, who quit a job at Google last year to speak more freely about AI, has said he fears the technology could cause misinformation, bias, battle robots, unemployment and even the end of humanity, if safety measures are not deployed.

But he still sees massive potential in AI and, hours after his Nobel win, had a message for the next generation of researchers who might be facing doubters like he did.

“If you believe in something, don’t give up on it until you understand why that belief is wrong,” he said.

“So long as you believe in that, keep working on it and don’t let people tell you it’s nonsense, if you can’t see why it’s nonsense.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 9, 2024.

A top U.S. commercial bakery is pushing back on a Food and Drug Administration warning to stop using labels that say its products contain sesame — a potentially dangerous allergen — when they don’t.

Bimbo Bakeries USA, which includes brands such as Sara Lee, Entenmann’s and Ball Park buns and rolls, appears to be defying an FDA warning sent in June that said the several of the company’s products are “misbranded” because the labels list sesame or tree nuts even though those ingredients aren’t in the foods.

In a response to the FDA, Bimbo officials said they wouldn’t change their sesame labeling. The company said it has plants where some products are made with sesame and some are not. But when it came to labeling, the company said it declares sesame as an ingredient and uses the same packaging for all of the products to prevent people from inadvertently eating foods that can trigger potentially life-threatening reactions.

“We think our approach is the most protective of sesame-allergic consumers,” the company wrote in a July 1 letter obtained by the advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest and shared with The Associated Press.

Bimbo officials confirmed their position in an email to the AP on Wednesday, calling it a “conservative approach” for consistent labeling of nationally distributed products.

FDA officials declined to comment, saying they would respond directly to the company. By law, the agency can take actions ranging from recalls to civil fines and criminal charges against companies that fail to heed warning letters.

But CSPI and other food safety advocates said the standoff continues a practice that misleads the estimated 33 million Americans with food allergies and results in limited choices for the more than 1.6 million who are allergic to sesame.

“We depend on accurate food labeling to feel safe,” said Sung Poblete, chief executive of the nonprofit group FARE, Food Allergy Research & Education. “We depend on accurate labeling to make the food choices that we make.”

The impasse follows a 2023 federal law that requires that all foods made and sold in the U.S. to be labeled if they contain sesame.

Bimbo Bakeries, which bills itself as the nation’s largest commercial baking company, was among several food producers and restaurant chains that began adding small amounts of sesame to foods that didn’t have it previously — and then listing it as an ingredient.

Several companies said they did that because it was too difficult and expensive to keep sesame used in one part of a baking plant out of another and they wanted to avoid liability and cost. The FDA has said that such actions are legal, although they violate the spirit of the law.

While Bimbo hasn’t changed sesame labeling, company officials told the agency they did change labels for certain breads that said they included tree nuts when they did not. The new labels now say the breads include hazelnut, the only tree nut used in the products, the company indicated.

CSPI had petitioned FDA in 2023 to halt the practice of adding sesame to foods to prevent risks of cross-contamination. It’s not clear what action the agency will take over Bimbo’s refusal to heed a warning letter, said Sarah Sorscher, CSPI’s director of regulatory affairs.

“It’s so unusual to see a big company like Bimbo calling the FDA’s bluff,” she added.

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This story has been updated to correct spelling of Sara Lee.

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The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.