Breaking down the Trudeau government's AI Investment

Well, you may have noticed of late the Prime Minister making a stream of pre budget announcements highlighting where plans to spend your money. One of the big ones to come out focuses on artificial intelligence $2.4 billion to, among other things, accelerate the development of this burgeoning sector. The bulk of the money going to infrastructure, but some of it for a new AI Compute Access fund. So what is that exactly? And is all of this money well spent or to be spent more appropriately? Let’s find out. Carmen Levy is the technology analyst and journalist. He joins us now. Carmen, great to see you. Welcome back. Good to be with you, Anthony. Thanks for having me. All right, so let’s begin with AI, compute access funds, sort of this cryptic, you know, generic fund in some respects. You can imagine why, Especially when people talk about, you know, spending our money, for example, people get a little cynical. But what do you think about this whole thing? Well, it makes sense. This is a new technology Canada needs to compete The rest of the world, countries everywhere, are some making similar investments. And if we want to keep up, we’re going to have to write some checks. And certainly by providing access to the technology, that’s an important first step. AI is very compute intensive. It puts huge demands on computers, on networks, demands huge amounts of power, which can often be unaffordable to the average Canadian or the average Canadian business. And so, similar to what the government in the early days of the in the commercial Internet boom a generation ago, they provide access to ordinary Canadians by by by allocating resources and money so that they can sort of dive in, roll up their sleeves, start using the technology without worrying about affordability. The bulk of this money, $2 billion worth of it is going specifically to that to jump start getting Canadians into that pool. There are smaller amounts of money for other things like digital safety as well as training, but certainly nowhere near enough to cover that range. We didn’t see a lot of details beyond the access issue, and I would have expected to have seen more. At this point, this is feels a little bit more like a political statement than an economic one. That’s an interesting one because a lot of people talk about, you know, there’s a difference between, you know, corporate welfare, giving money to people who already have it or whatever, and putting money into research, for example, at universities, which I think more people generally could get behind. And that’s absolutely, I’m glad you mentioned that because it’s absolutely critical. You can’t just throw money into the economy and then let everyone else figure out what to do with it. You have to have your people prepared to take on those challenges. The the economy of tomorrow is going to be driven by AI whether we like it or not. So Canadians need to be prepared when we are going through school, primary, secondary, post secondary. The at each of those levels needs to be ready to to to prepare us for that AI enabled world once we get into the job market. We need human resources. We need talent management companies, government agencies to be able to ensure that the right skills are in place, ready for the right jobs, and that Canadians who are most affected by by AI, in other words their jobs are at most risk of being overtaken or made obsolete by AI. That they have the skills and the tools. They need the training to transition into a somewhat different career path. And so it’s the human aspect that that is probably the most important one here, doesn’t always get the attention that it deserves and certainly didn’t get the funding that it’ll likely need for us to really pull it off at scale. That’s an interesting point. And you wonder with this kind of money, you hope that if it is what everyone says it will be and it is already in many ways that it’s going to spur and foster innovation. I’m wondering if if this money and if it goes that direction with this, is this a matter of just Canada playing catch up or do you think this would put Canada at least near the top? It’s hard to compete with some of the other countries like the United States for example, but what are your thoughts on that? I wish I could say that Canada is a leader in this, but we aren’t and we typically never are. This isn’t just isn’t Canada’s deal. Our economy is too small on a global scale for us to drive tech policy for other countries to follow. We tend to be the followers and in this case it’s the European Union with its new AI act that is really setting the stage for other countries and and jurisdictions to follow as well as the US which is going beyond just writing checks. They’re actually dictating. The government agencies bring on within the next 60 days a chief AI officer to start the process. And so we we follow we do not lead but I would hope that we will be looking toward the EU and the US and others to start incorporating their best practices into our planning. We’ve got to do a lot more than just throw money at this problem. We’ve got to make sure that we’re making the structural changes, not someday, not years from now, but right now, rolling up our please. And that just isn’t happening here. We just saw an announcement about dollars. It’ll take a lot more than dollars. We appreciate your insight on this. Carmen, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thank you again. That is Carmen Levy, technology analyst, journalist, among many other things. Great context. Appreciate it. Appreciate being here, Anthony. Thank you.