A conversation with Philippe Beaudoin (ElementAI)

This episode is brought to you by the McGill Dobson Centre for Entrepreneurship. Our mission is to inspire, teach, and develop world-class entrepreneurs. Now, Made at McGill is usually a narrative-driven, highly produced podcast about the origin stories of McGill’s top entrepreneurs. But this episode is different, it’s experimental; it doesn’t match that description at all. It’s more of a “Friends of McGill” episode, and it’s unedited audio from a live conversation I had on stage at McGill with Philip Beaudoin.

Philip Beaudoin is Co-Founder and Senior Vice-President of Research at ElementAI. Element AI delivers AI software products at scale to help people work smarter.

This conversation explores Philip's journey on the way to co-founding Element AI and how they plan to democratize artificial intelligence with a non-predatory, collaborative research model. He also shares some stories from his time at Google that led to him making a stand for ethical AI, including a conversation he had with Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology.

Before we dive in, let me give you a rough idea of what Philippe’s path looked like up to now. After doing his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and PhD in computer science at Universite de Montreal, he went on to do his Postdoc at UBC. Throughout his studies and research, he was always working on side projects in industries like computer graphics, video games, and software. After his postdoc, he spent 5 years at Google, where among other things, he worked on the Google Chrome New Tab page that you probably use everyday. And in 2016, he co-founded ElementAI, which recently topped the annual list of Canadian tech companies with the potential to reach $1B in value.

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