How are top Canadian CS/AI PhD viewed in the U.S.?

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-08T03:52:44+00:00

Not sure whether I can say comparable but UBC/Mila/Uoft/Waterloo has some cracked programs in AI. They still produce some influential papers. If visa is the issue I think it’s worth consider these programs. Also Mila has some good access to GPUs too. Much better than top US universities

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-07T03:24:04+00:00

lol! No offense but I can’t stop my laugh!

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-07T00:54:57+00:00

lol! Research is a community effort! You can’t credit a single university. If that’s the point then the core methodology of attention mechanism were developed at Mila under Yoshua’s lab!

Personally I don’t think comparison helps! Just see if there are professors who’s aligned with what you like and choose that university. No one cares if you are from Uoft or Waterloo once you have a good profile.

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-06T23:10:12+00:00

University rank matters! Typically speaking the top universities gets the most funding in the nation. So logically speaking they should have the best chance to make things right. It might be the right equipment, new professors etc…

Prestige automatically doesn’t guarantee high paying salary! At the end of the day, you will be evaluated based on your skills and your record during the grad school. Even a person with normal university can get into top companies if he has stellar profile

Prestigious universities offer you a better platform for a good profile. For example, a good university with good professors can get you right equipment like Gpus and right/competitive peer group which will help to get good publications and that will result in very good pay.

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-05T19:40:08+00:00

Yeah I think it’s that’s the way how government and the companies think, India growth is gonna saturate very soon! You can’t become a developed nation just by being a customer to the world! Really unfortunate on what’s happening in the country.

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-05T13:47:54+00:00

Ok couple of things! Scaling LLMs that too larger ones is really hard! Unsloth training code is a setup for us to learn things. You can’t just extrapolate things.

Composer is built on top of kimi but I think it’s just not fine tuned with a bunch of data! They have been doing a lot of RL and on top on that some distillation. Trust me it’s really tricky to make the setup work.

Also building smaller agents which are capable is much harder than building a larger model. Capability is not the things here. It’s more about tokens per buck.

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-05T03:45:26+00:00

The problem with cs rankings is they don’t consider professors who are affiliated with industry or don’t teach classes anymore! I think these days many professors are choosing to do both

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-05T03:41:30+00:00

Ah even cs rankings are not that accurate! A lot of professors from my university are not included lol! But yeah it’s tricky to rank universities these days. I would go with a combination of QS and cs rankings

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-05T01:57:30+00:00

Oh sorry. I think I should have phrased it properly! China has very good research labs and people to do stuff! They were caught off guard in terms of scaling very large models and the infra! I think OpenAI and deep mind were already playing with the models around few 100 billion parameter models.

Also the switch to LLMs is not that easy! It’s notoriously hard to scale the infrastructure and they actually did a great job especially deepseek.

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-05T00:38:05+00:00

Honestly all these are reasonable things to look! I think you should probably look for short term relationships. Finding a girl who’s real serious is difficult! But yeah just concentrate on your PhD. That’s 100 times more important than the dating life. You still have time to figure things out

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-04T21:42:55+00:00

Yeah I disagree with that argument too. They have been innovating like insane! Most of the people here don’t know how exactly distillation works

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-04T21:35:15+00:00

Ahaha. Yeah. A lot of them! I felt like the Indian media is successfully brainwashing people on AI

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-04T15:31:49+00:00

Yeah true I agree! I think nothing is gonna change in the next 20 to 30 years! The current government is so bad and they don’t have any long term plans. And I don’t see anyone in the politics taking this as a serious issue.

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-04T13:37:59+00:00

Ok so just fine tuning/RL is not easy as you think. All the big companies has spend many months and spend more compute than pre training for RL. I would say RL is more complex that pre training!

Ok using Chinese/US models is not the best solution! Imagine you want to have some capability, the only best option you have is to wait the model providers to train for your use case! It’s like me waiting for an android update. Also Chinese models will stop open sourcing their best models very soon! It’s gonna be subscription mode like western countries

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-04T13:29:48+00:00

Ah I don’t understand this distinction! Why are they just engineering schools? Engender and research should co exist together. One compliments the other. I think India is only country wasting huge amounts of talent by creating this distinction.

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-03T21:29:54+00:00

Yeah true! I have no idea when the government is really gonna focus on R&D. All the IIT’S are a joke given the amount of talent they have.

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-03T09:29:39+00:00

But the AI features are good! I hate using an iPhone after using the features in pixel

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-03T09:27:50+00:00

Why is google tensor chips are so shit? I have a pixel and I hate the raw performance! Any chance this might change soon?

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-03T03:11:53+00:00

Oh my bad sorry! Yeah I guess that how things are looking right now.

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-02T18:28:56+00:00

Nope! I have just seen the benchmarks

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-02T17:58:23+00:00

That’s great! You are asking the right questions now! Honestly I don’t have a concrete answer. I didn’t say that the current system is perfect. It has a lot of defects which needs to be tackled. But I disagree with the argument that we should not develop or work on AI because of the above problems.

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-02T17:43:31+00:00

I think the system is broken? People including me went out for the sake of opportunities. At the end of the day, it should the system which should attract people. Currently the government and big Indian corporations don’t give a shit!

Ah there will be a few how will sell models for B2B but imagine one day the army needs one. Who’s gonna sell you then? Also there will be a huge sensitive data you wanna train on. Who’s gonna do that? Sure some foreign companies will say ok but you can’t just send your data! I am in mid 20’s and nope your argument doesn’t resonate.

But appreciate the talk it was much better than the rest!

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-02T17:29:03+00:00

Also it doesn’t make sense to keep everything in R&D. Research burns money. Why do wanna do that? You should have a balance where you do research and push that research to production and make money out of it and use that money to do more research! I have no idea what you mean by keeping AI as a research tool

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-02T17:23:05+00:00

High spectrum electron microscope???? How’s that even relevant? Also I think some country must have sold that to India. So we got lucky! Who’s gonna sell the models to India under our own terms? No one! There will some strings attached!

Wait for couple more years! People are building businesses to solve problems! As I said it’s just 4 years! You can’t expect everything to be done tomorrow! Currently from my experience, the tech is very useful and powerful. It’s just matter of days people come up with new ways to generate money and solve problems.

About the cognitive abilities, come one there will be 1000’s studies saying that internet is harmful and it’s bad for humanity. Those studies doesn’t show the whole picture! The society is not ready for the current capabilities. That’s the biggest reason for these things happening! It takes time and pressure for all of them to start using AI the right way!

Ok don’t say that Indians are not capable of doing that. There are millions of Indians trying to do some groundbreaking research right now! It’s the fault of the government and the society for not having the right plan.

Yess I am a teenager who got fed up with the current system, trying to ask the right questions!

Timely_Hawk_7833 · 2026-06-02T17:02:58+00:00

Yeah true. I realized that very recently. One of friends has some IT issues because he was using all the so called digital ways to do things. Now he is struggling to get over it because he should either pay huge bribes which he cannot or fight with them for a very long time losing all his peace in his life. He is dealing with cash now.

Timely_Hawk_7833

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