What AI Alliance members want Canada to prioritize

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press

When more than 50 tech companies, universities and startups from around the world united to form the AI Alliance last December, much of the globe was still making sense of the rapid advances in artificial intelligence.

With regulators eyeing the technology and questions swirling about whether its use would amplify biases and discrimination, take people's jobs or even spell the end of humanity, the industry group was meant to parse through the worries and find practical ways to move forward with AI. 

About seven months later, the organization, led by IBM and Meta Platforms Inc., numbers roughly 100 members and has formed working groups to address everything from AI skills to safety.

The Canadian Press asked members what measures Canada should prioritize as AI evolves.

More risk, more reward

Abhishek Gupta, founder of the Montreal AI Ethics Institute, considers Canada "the original home of AI." 

Some of the technology's pioneers, including Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, have done much of their work within the country. Long before AI was buzzy, Canada was a hotbed for research in the sector.

But Gupta is worried about the country's ability to turn AI into profits.

"Where we started to lose our edge, unfortunately, is in commercialization," he said.

Some of that stems from Canadian talent seeking higher pay in the U.S. and other countries, where Gupta has heard of engineers making just shy of $1 million a year. U.S. venture capital firms with deeper pockets — and an often bolder approach — can outspend those in Canada, further driving home-grown companies away, he said.

The pattern continues when investors sell part or all of their ownership in a company. Many Canadian founders have opted for an exit that hands their business to a firm outside of Canada because of how much money buyers are willing to pay elsewhere.

As an example of how AI talent has seeped out of the country, Gupta points to Element AI, a Montreal-based firm that created AI solutions for large organizations, which was sold to California-based ServiceNow in 2020. 

"It's not great that it didn't continue to remain a Canadian company ... because the big thing we want to see is, of course, a translation of research into commercial success," he said.

Jeremy Barnes, ElementAI's former chief technology officer and now vice-president of AI for ServiceNow, similarly laments how Canada has been unable to take advantage of the edge it once had.

To turn things around, he thinks the country has to stop being so conservative and VC firms need to focus less on protecting themselves from losses and more on how to "share in the benefits" of startups.

"You have got to put your chips in the game in order to be able to win the jackpot," he said.

Canada needs to look outside the "highly visible companies" and pour support into breakout businesses that are garnering less attention but have lots of potential, Barnes said.

The right guardrails

When the Alliance was founded, countries were already shaping their AI regulations. 

U.S. President Joe Biden had issued an executive order requiring AI developers to share safety test results and other information with the government and the European Union had implemented tough compliance requirements.

Manav Gupta, vice-president and chief technology officer at IBM Canada, likes the expediency with which the U.S. government moved and the EU policy because it's a layered approach that recognizes that AI systems tied to weapons, for example, carry very different risks than those involved in tasks like processing welfare claims.

He thinks the two policies have "championed the way" for other countries, acting as a benchmark for what AI regulations should look like worldwide.

Canada tabled an AI-centric bill in 2022, but it won't be implemented until at least 2025, so the country has resorted to a voluntary code of conduct, which IBM and a few dozen other companies have signed, in the meantime.

Any policy the country lands on, Gupta said, should have a "well-defined framework" with a tiered approach to risks.

"The greater the risk of the technology, the higher the grading of the risk and therefore, the greater the regulation and the greater transparency," he said.

The country should also be careful not to stray too far from the global direction regulations are taking on, said ServiceNow's Barnes.

"What it will do if it's done wrong is it will create friction, which makes it harder for Canadian companies to compete with others, so to some extent, the role of Canada can't be to go it alone."

Focus on open-source AI

As gains in AI become more frequent, Kevin Chan, global policy campaign strategies director at Facebook- and Instagram-owner Meta, is advocating for the tech industry to embrace the open-source model.

Open-source models mean the code underpinning the AI system is freely available for anyone to use, modify and build on, thus expanding access to AI, bolstering development and research and even bringing transparency to the technology.

"That's actually how innovation happens," Chan said of the open-source philosophy.

"We want to make sure that there is space that exists for people to choose to use open models so that we can get faster innovation, so that we can democratize this technology to more people."

Open-source models have their downsides though — people can use them to harm and when vulnerabilities become known, hackers can attack multiple systems at once — but Chan sees the approach as an opportunity.

"Open models are great for countries like Canada, who may not have the ... resources to build their own frontier models," he says. 

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 21, 2024.

Surveillance risks posed by AI among the technology's most urgent problems: Hinton

Tara Deschamps, The Canadian Press

Artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has become synonymous with doomsday-like warnings that predict the technology could pose an existential threat, but on Wednesday, he put the spotlight on another risk he said is even more pressing for humanity.

"The existential threat is the one I've talked about the most, but that's not the most urgent part," he told a standing-room only audience at the Collision tech conference in Toronto. 

"I think surveillance is something to worry about. AI is going to be very good at surveillance."

It's of particular worry to the British-Canadian computer scientist because he believes it could help authoritarian regimes stay in power. In some instances, he thinks there will be few protections against these regimes, whose power sometimes even supreme courts can't counter.

AI's ability to spy on humanity's every move has long been on Hinton's lengthy list of worries he's rattled off at appearances over the last year designed to get the world thinking more cautiously about AI and considering what guardrails the technology needs as it explodes into usage at businesses and beyond.

The worries he named Wednesday include the rise of lethal autonomous weapons, which he said are coming soon, along with fake videos, corrupted elections, cybercrime and job losses that could increase the gap between the rich and poor.

There's also an "alignment problem" because humanity can't always agree on what is good and that could have repercussions when powerful technology is in our hands.

"Some people think it's good to drop 2,000-pound bombs on children and other people don't," he said.

"They've both got their reasons, but you can't align with both of them."

But the risk Hinton has bandied around that has generated the most attention is his sci-fi-like predictions that warn of battle robots and humanity's very existence being in peril because of AI.

The prognostications have divided the tech community with some saying an existential crisis is a far-off possibility and others thinking it won't materialize at all because humans will always be able to pull the plug on AI.

Hinton left his job at Google, which bought a neural network business he co-founded with two students in 2013, just as AI worries were swirling around his mind. 

"I left Google because I was 75. I wanted a break and to watch a lot of Netflix," he quipped.

"But also as I left Google, I figured I could just warn ... that in the long run, these things could get smarter than us and might go rogue. That's not science fiction like Aidan Gomez thinks. That's real."

Gomez is the co-founder of Cohere, a Toronto-based enterprise AI company Hinton has backed. He told the Collision audience on Tuesday that he feels the technology is not bound to exceed human capabilities any time soon, and if it does he's skeptical any sci-fi like scenarios will arise.

Asked how the world can counter AI's problems, Hinton conceded "for most things, I have no idea what they should do."

But on the matter of existential threat, he called on governments to conduct large safety experiments because they're "the only thing powerful enough to make the big companies invest significant amounts of money."

When it comes to fake videos and attempts at skewing elections, he also has an idea meant to "build up resistance" to AI-generated material spreading falsehoods. He said he recently shared the idea with billionaire philanthropists who solicited his advice.

"My suggestion was pay for a lot of advertisements where you have a very convincing fake video, and then right at the end of it say, 'This was a fake video,'" he said.

Hinton’s talk was the most anticipated at Collision, where organizers expected 37,832 people and a record number of female founders to take in talks over three days.

Hinton’s 20-minute appearance was slimmed down from the roughly hour-long interview he gave at the event the year before, but both talks were equally hyped.

His views carry considerable weight in the tech world because he won the A.M. Turing Award, known as the Nobel Prize of computing, in 2018 with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun, who disagrees with Hinton's existential threat theory.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 19, 2024.