What Areas is TAICO Working In?

TAICO’s purpose as an organization is to explore the areas of AI and cybersecurity and understand what we need to build, whether it’s companies, products, open source software, fun demos, cool t-shirts, shareable content, or general knowledge.

The Five Key Areas of Focus

These are the five main areas of TAICO. Of course, as we evolve these focus areas may change. But these seem to be a good starting place. Comments welcome!

• Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  The field of AI has been around for a long time. As far back as 1950 Alan Turing asked if machines could think. Recently, there have been considerable advances in the space, especially around large language models, a technology which has enabled some amazing–and possibly stupefying–things. It seems undeniable that this is a massive (and probably secular) change; there’s a lot of new information to learn about. Whether or not we all agree that the technology will bring positive benefits, we still need to understand it, what it can and can’t do, how to use it, and how to secure it–all of which is a considerable amount of work, work that we didn’t have to do before.

• Cybersecurity

  On the one hand, we are better at cybersecurity–the defensive capabilities, the barriers we put in front of hackers, are definitely higher than they were decades ago. But on the other hand, we have a lot more entropy to deal with. Computing is more powerful, more complicated, and more abundant. We just have so many things to manage that our overall ability to secure them is diminishing. We’re running right into the attack hypersurface.

• AI for Cybersecurity

  Can AI help us, our software, and our systems be more secure? Can it help us write better code, or fix the code we already have? Can it help us understand our massively complex systems? These are outstanding questions and TAICO is going to work towards understanding the answers we come up with as a global technology ecosystem.

• Cybersecurity for AI

  Most of us live in a techno-society in the sense that almost every facet of our lives involves technology in some way. We have to register for things online. We have to have access to email to get basic government services. It goes on and on. And now our techno-society is going to have an AI underpinning. How do we deploy these AI systems securely and make sure they’re not vulnerable to attack?

• AI Safety

  Ensuring that AI systems are safe and ethically aligned with human values is critical. We will explore strategies to mitigate risks associated with AI, including unintended consequences and malicious use.

Constructing Things

There’s a lot of value in simply sharing knowledge. But the goal of TAICO is to go at least one step further and build…er…stuff. What could we build? What could this “stuff” be? Well, one of the best things to build is a valuable business. But that takes a lot of work and maybe even some luck. So while that is an important avenue to pursue, and we should pursue it, there are other ways to “build” and to “construct” such as creating software or other shareable information like blog posts, videos, and workshops. These things don’t have to last forever. They don’t have to be perfect. They can be experiments. These are the things we can build and share and use to create value in Canada.

More to come! Feel free to share your thoughts or get involved by reaching out to us.