1. What is the Vector Institute? Is a foundation? Is it a not-for-profit corporation? Something else?
2. Who controls it? The government (which has put in most of the announced funding)? The University of Toronto? Google? A combination of all of those?
3. Who will own the work created by the Institute? How will it be licensed, and what rules will govern its publication?
These are questions that would be answered at a very early stage of an ordinary research partnership between a public university and a corporation, but I can find none of these details about Vector.
In another comment someone posted the link to Vector's website (which I couldn't find linked from any of the announcements, nor by searching on Google), which clarifies #1 and #2.
Vector is organized as a not-for-profit corporation. It has 12 directors including some academics, some big names from corporate Canada, two VCs, a few entrepreneurs, and a few people with close ties to the Ontario government.
The directors are:
Ed Clark - former bank CEO, Ontario government economic advisor
Scott Bonham - VC
Vivek Goel - senior administrator at U of T
Mary Jo Haddad - management consultant specializing in healthcare
Chaviva Hosek - U of T public policy professor, former Canadian government advisor
Jordan Jacobs - lawyer and founder of an AI company
Stephen Lake - engineer and founder
Nadir Mohamed - former Big 3 telecom CEO, associated with Ryerson University
Michael Serbinis - scientist and founder
Pearl Sullivan - Dean of Engineering at UWaterloo
Terrence Sullivan - healthcare policy professor at U of T, closely tied to the Ontario government
#3 bothers me a lot. It reminds me of the way owners of sports franchises use public tax-payer money to pay for stadiums, meanwhile keeping all the profits from the money made by their teams.
If the various governments in Canada are funding this research and Google is contributing such a minor amount of funding, who is the beneficiary of the research output? Does Google get first dibs on all the information? Does the research ultimately find its most valuable commercial use at Google? Who else stands to benefit from this research? Are any of these beneficiaries going to directly be Canadians? Or are Canadians merely going to be tertiary benefactors with the primary ones being the researchers working in Toronto taking salaries?
Google is one of 11 companies (the platinum level sponsors) that committed $5M to Vector. It's not a Google thing.
The researchers are Vector are free to pursue their own interests, and publish their work like any other academic. Their output is not owned by Google or any of the corporate sponsors.
Also, this is meant to retain talents in Canada rather than coming to USA to work for companies like Google. By working for Google in Canada? Doesn't having "Google Brain" in Canada imply people are working for Google but it's one based in Canada now?
Vector seems to be some kind of hybrid entity, presumably designed to soak up ML talent at the University that revived AI research while also soaking up taxpayer dollars for Google.
Added bonus of making Trump look bad by doing cool stuff in USA's backyard instead of the valley.
2. Who controls it? The government (which has put in most of the announced funding)? The University of Toronto? Google? A combination of all of those?
3. Who will own the work created by the Institute? How will it be licensed, and what rules will govern its publication?
These are questions that would be answered at a very early stage of an ordinary research partnership between a public university and a corporation, but I can find none of these details about Vector.