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👋Hi there! It’s Kate, managing editor of Vancouver Tech Journal.

We’re trying out a new-look Sunday Briefing newsletter this week. You know the bullet-point lists of news we usually have in each category? I’ve switched them out for a more in-depth look at the most important story of the week. Hopefully that’ll provide you with more detail on the top Vancouver news items you need to know.

This week, Vancouver's Weave VC is betting big that companies don’t force employees to come back to the office, with its investment in Wavy. Plus, discover the similarities between the Vancouver companies that made the list of the TSX’s top 30 businesses, what new product marked legaltech unicorn Clio’s first foray into AI, and check out an upcoming climate documentary series from former VTJ staff writer Allison Gacad.

Let me know what you think of the new look! You can either take the poll below or at the end of the email, or shoot me a message at [email protected]. Truly, I’d love to hear from you!

Now onto today’s briefing. It’s 1,398 words: a three-minute read.

-Kate

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Read more at vantechjournal.com

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Cancer vaccines could be closer than you think. This week, Vancouver giant Biovaxys closed its fifth tranche of private placement capital in an effort to advance the elusive tech. The company recently acquired the whole portfolio of Halifax biotech outfit Immunovaccine Technologies, and this money — $225,000 — will go towards advancing Biovaxys’ plans of how to use that material.

The company uses the technique of “haptenization”, which is a process that uses chemicals to train a person’s immune system to recognize and aggressively target tumors or viral proteins. Currently, Biovaxys is developing a vaccine to help cure stage three and four ovarian cancer.

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If you’re on the hunt for a new job, a great place to start might be Teck Resources. The Vancouver-headquartered outfit, which focuses on responsibly finding and mining the metals needed for cleantech and the green energy transition, has just been named to the Forbes list of the World’s Best Employers 2024.

The winning firms were chosen based on surveys covering more than 300,000 employees from over 50 countries working for multinational companies and institutions.

Teck has also been named one of Canada’s Top 100 Employers by Mediacorp Canada’s Top Employers Program for the past seven years, and is one of Canada's Top Employers for Young People 2024. Oh, and you can read more about Teck in our deep-dive article on the TSX’s top companies this week.

Mining has become an increasingly important topic in the tech world. Businesses have long been using digital twin technologies in mining, starting with the boom in VR in the mid-2010s, and the technologies have only been getting better. Plus, Invest Vancouver argues that one of the places the region can excel is by combining resource extraction with AI.

Wondering why you're not getting the best answers out of AI, while everyone else is raving about it? Software development firm Farpoint Technologies’ CTO Ryan Monsurate breaks down the science behind why how you talk to your AI matters.

"Why do LLMs need to study the world over billions or trillions of tokens, while a human child can learn so much from far less information?

Humans simply have an unfair advantage: we're born with brains pre-wired with functionality accumulated through millions of years of evolution. Our neural networks are shaped not just by our personal experiences but by the collective journey of our ancestors. We're equipped with innate abilities — like recognizing faces, interpreting emotions, and understanding basic physics — that help us navigate the world from the moment we're born.

In contrast, AI models start with a blank slate. They don't have the benefit of evolutionary pre-training. Every connection, every piece of "understanding" they develop comes from the data they're fed during training. They learn not just patterns in language, but patterns in concepts and ideas, and use those higher level patterns to predict the next word in a sentence." Keep reading »

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