Tavares helps Maple Leafs snap Jets unbeaten streak with 6-4 road win

TORONTO – Canadian Jamal Murray scored five points in the final 5:01 of play as the Denver Nuggets stormed back against the Toronto Raptors for a 127-125 overtime win on Monday.

Murray, from nearby Kitchener, Ont., finished with 17 points, eight rebounds and seven assists.

Nikola Jokic led all scorers with 40 points, pulling down 10 rebounds as Denver (1-2) overcame a 15-point deficit. Aaron Gordon fell short of a triple-double with 16 points, 11 boards and eight assists.

RJ Barrett of Mississauga, Ont., put up a three-point attempt in the dying seconds of the overtime period that could have been the winner for Toronto (1-3) but it hit the rim. He finished with 20 points, five rebounds and three assists in his first game of the regular season after missing time with a sprained shoulder.

Scottie Barnes and Jakob Poeltl each had a double-double for the Raptors. Poeltl had 16 points and a career-high 19 rebounds while Barnes was an assist shy of a triple-double with 21 points, 11 rebounds, and nine assists.

Barnes had to be helped to the bench with 24 seconds left to play in the fourth after taking an elbow to the right eye. He did not return to the court.

It was the end of a physical night for Barnes. He was also the recipient of a flagrant foul by Nuggets point guard Russell Westbrook early in the fourth quarter. Westbrook and Barnes started jawing at each other after the play with their teammates, coaches, and officials having to separate them.

TAKEAWAYS

Nuggets: By percentage it was Denver’s best three-point shooting performance of the young season, making 45 per cent of their shots from beyond the arc. But that came on only 20 three-point attempts, woefully low in the modern NBA. It continued an alarming trend for the 2023 NBA champions, who entered Monday’s contest with 28.8 per cent three-point shooting. The Nuggets’ average of 95.5 points over the first two games of their season is worst in the NBA.

Raptors: Rookies Jamal Shead and Jonathan Mogbo as well as veteran Ochai Agbaji all added a spark off the bench. Toronto’s reserves outscored Denver’s 37-24, with Abaji getting 15, Shead scoring eight, and Mogbo registering six.

KEY MOMENT

Murray drove to the net for a layup with 0.1 seconds left in the fourth to tie the game at 114-114 after the Raptors led by as many as 15 points. It punctuated a 13-3 run that got Denver back into the game. He then added four more points in the extra period.

KEY STAT

The Raptors had 74 points in the paint to Denver’s 68. It was a surprising disparity with Jokic remaining his dominant self, months removed from his third NBA MVP.

UP NEXT

Nuggets: Visit the Brooklyn Nets on Tuesday.

Raptors: Visit the Charlotte Hornets on Wednesday.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 28, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

TISDALE, Sask. – RCMP say a school bus crash in Saskatchewan has injured the driver as well as some of the children aboard.

Police say the bus, which was the only vehicle involved, crashed shortly before 4 p.m. Monday about 22 kilometres southwest of Tisdale.

In an evening news release, police said the bus was upright in the ditch near a rural intersection.

Police say the driver’s injuries were not life-threatening and that some children were also being treated for injuries.

Police did not provide details on the children’s ages, injuries or how many required treatment in hospital.

They note there is a road closure in the area and they continue to investigate.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 28, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

TORONTO – Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton says it’s getting more difficult to tell videos, voices and images generated with the technology from material that’s real — but he has an idea to aid in the battle.

The increased struggle has contributed to a shift in how the British-Canadian computer scientist and recent Nobel Prize recipient thinks the world could address fake content.

“For a while, I thought we may be able to label things as generated by AI,” Hinton said Monday at the inaugural Hinton Lectures.

“I think it’s more plausible now to be able to recognize that things are real by taking a code in them and going to some websites and seeing the same things on that website.”

He reasons this approach would verify content isn’t fake and imagines it could be particularly handy when it comes to political video advertisements.

“You could have something like a QR code in them (taking you) to a website, and if there’s an identical video on that website, all you have to do is know that that website is real,” Hinton explained.

Most Canadians have spotted deepfakes online and almost a quarter encounter them weekly, according to an April survey of 2,501 Canadians conducted by the Dais, a public policy organization at Toronto Metropolitan University.

Deepfakes are digitally manipulated images or videos depicting scenes that have not happened. Recent deepfakes have depicted Pope Francis in a Balenciaga puffer jacket and pop star Taylor Swift in sexually explicit poses.

The Hinton Lectures are a two-night event the Global Risk Institute is hosting this week at the John W. H. Bassett Theatre in Toronto.

The first evening saw Hinton, who is often called the godfather of AI, take the stage briefly to remind the audience of the litany of risks he’s been warning the public over the last few years that the technology poses. He feels AI could cause or contribute to accidental disasters, joblessness, cybercrime, discrimination and biological and existential threats.

However, the bulk of the evening was dedicated to a talk from Jacob Steinhardt, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences and statistics at UC Berkeley in California.

Steinhardt told the audience he believes AI will advance even faster than many expect but there will be surprises along the way.

By 2030, he imagines AI will be “superhuman,” when it comes to math, programming and hacking.

He also thinks large language models, which underpin AI systems, could become capable of persuasion or manipulation.

“There is significant headroom, if someone were to try to train (them) for persuasiveness, perhaps either an unscrupulous company or a government that cared about persuading its citizens,” Steinhardt said. “There’s a lot of things you could do.”

He told the audience he sees himself as a “worried optimist,” who believes there’s a 10 per cent chance the technology will lead to human extinction and a 50 per cent chance it will cause immense economic value and “radical prosperity.”

Asked at a later news conference about Steinhardt’s “worried optimist” label, Hinton called himself a “worried pessimist.”

“There’s research showing that if you ask people to estimate risks, normal, healthy people way underestimate the risks of really bad things … and the people who get the risks about right are the mildly depressed,” Hinton said.

“I think of myself as one of those, and I think the risks are a bit higher than Jacob (Steinhardt) thinks, let’s say around 20 per cent.”

Hinton also used the news conference to share more about what he has done with his half of the 11 million Swedish kronor (about C$1.45 million) he and Princeton University researcher John Hopfield received when they won the Nobel Prize for physics earlier in the month.

Hinton said he has donated half his share of the award to Water First, a Creemore, Ont., organization training Indigenous communities in how to develop and provide access to safe water systems.

He initially mulled giving some of the money to a water organization actor Matt Damon is involved with in Africa, but then he said his partner asked him “What about Canada?”

That led Hinton to discover Water First. He said he was compelled to donate to it because of the land acknowledgements he hears at the start of many events.

“I think it’s great that they’re recognizing (who lived on the land first), but it doesn’t stop Indigenous kids getting diarrhea,” he said.

Hinton previously said some of his winnings will also be directed to an organization that provides jobs to neurodiverse young adults.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 28, 2024.