Watch out US, Carney bets on AI strategy for Canada
Canada, a global hub for artificial intelligence research and home to some of the technology’s pioneers, announced plans Thursday to become a leader in middle powers vying to build a sovereign AI capability.
These plans, revealed as part of the country’s national AI strategycommit to investing millions of dollars in research facilities; to introduce relevant privacy and consumer protection legislation; to build a public AI supercomputer; and creating free AI tutorials
When it comes to technology policy, Canada tends to ride the tailwinds of the United States. But amid ongoing political and trade tensions, the United States is conspicuously absent from Canada’s vision for the future of AI.
“Prosperity and sovereignty in the age of artificial intelligence belong to nations that can build, adopt and manage artificial intelligence on their own terms,” Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters Thursday from a downtown Toronto hospital that is a leader in health technology innovation.
Canada has refocused its AI ambitions to align with like-minded middle powers such as Australia, France and Germany, just as it has with its military, trade and energy infrastructure projects.
“Canadian AI adoption will be prudent, pragmatic and pro-worker,” Mr. Carney said.
Still, he emphasized that the conversation with the United States is not adversarial and that companies based there will continue to play an important role in Canada’s technology ecosystem. Mr. Carney pointed to the example of Anthropic, which gave the Canadian government access to its latest artificial intelligence model, Mythos. The company said the model was so powerful it was too dangerous to release.
The threat to public safety posed by the use of AI chatbots became a concern for Canadians after the mass shooting at a school in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, in February that killed eight people.
Eight months before the attack, the shooter’s account at OpenAI was flagged internally for content that violated the company’s policies and was suspended. Although there was discussion within the company that these concerns would be brought to the attention of Canadian law enforcement, this did not happen. Open AI has since apologized and revised its policies for heightened security concerns.
The government plans to introduce legislation aimed at protecting children’s information and protecting individuals’ privacy rights against “deepfake” and tracking pricing, the practice of adjusting the prices people see based on personal information about them.
Canada also wants its digital sovereignty to reflect the approach it has taken to defense sovereignty — buying locally and building domestic capabilities before buying elsewhere.
Mr. Carney emphasized that other core Canadian values, such as the French language, its indigenous heritage and its history, particularly as the training ground of the three “godfathers” of AI — Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Richard Sutton — will be strengthened in shaping the government’s use of the technology. Computer scientists are known for their breakthroughs in laying the mathematical and theoretical foundations for modern AI
The government has set an ambitious target of creating 250,000 AI jobs over the next five years. That goal is likely to face major obstacles because of Canada’s persistent “brain drain” problem, in which the country trains highly skilled workers who then leave, usually for the United States, for lower taxes, higher wages and more opportunities.
“Canada helped make modern AI possible, and Canadians should be proud of that,” Aidan Gomez, chief executive of Cohere, a Canadian AI company, said in a statement.
“Canada has seen too many big ideas grow elsewhere,” Mr. Gomez added. “AI should be where that changes.