(Ottawa) Canada has impressive research capacity. It has billions of dollars in public funding. But when it comes to transforming this vast knowledge in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) to create businesses, products and investments, Canada is lagging behind – and, some experts say, falling behind. a bullet in the foot.
Why give up all that brain power to “Silicon Valley”? This was a major question posed to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau when he recently spoke with journalists on a New York Times podcast.
“We are proud of Canada’s pioneering role in the development of AI,” Trudeau said on “Hard Fork,” noting that many breakthroughs have come about because Canadian scientists were well funded.
In 2017, Canada became the first country to have a national AI strategy. Ottawa launched a second phase five years later, allocating $443 million to connect research capacity with programs to enable commercialization.
This year’s federal budget included an additional $2.4 billion investment in AI. And the government has boasted that Canada has 10% of the “world’s best AI researchers.”
Among them are the “Canadian godfathers of AI”: Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, at Mila and Vector, respectively.
But Ottawa is “fighting to make sure we stay in the game,” Trudeau admitted to the podcast hosts. He insisted that Canada has many of the ingredients that AI needs: including clean energy, a good quality of life for workers and government programs to encourage the sector. Despite all this, Canada has not always been “good at marketing,” Trudeau acknowledged.
Benjamin Bergen, president of the Canadian Council of Innovators, which represents the technology sector, even believes that Canadians are “far behind”.
The government has spent “huge amounts of money on the talent part of the equation,” but not on converting them into businesses, he said recently. According to him, the Canadian government has “institutionalized the transfer of our AI intellectual property to foreign companies.”
The government’s strategy update, published in 2022, promises that the country’s three AI institutes will “help translate artificial intelligence research findings into commercial applications and increase the capacity of businesses to adopt these new technologies”.
But Mr. Bergen maintains that beyond a strategy for the development of AI focused on commercialization, Canada must worry about retaining its intellectual property. “You can’t market what you don’t own. »
Intellectual property lawyer Jim Hinton attempts to quantify this problem. About three-quarters of the patents produced by researchers working for Toronto’s Vector Institute and Montreal’s Mila leave the country, and most of them are in the hands of “web giants,” according to Me’s research. Hinton.
Another 18% of the 244 patents he tracked – 198 from Vector and 46 from Mila – are now owned by North American academic institutions. Only 7% is held in the Canadian private sector.
Of the foreign-owned patents, the largest number, 65, went to Uber, while 35 landed at the Walt Disney Company. Nvidia, which recently supplanted Microsoft as the world’s largest market capitalization, got 34. IBM ended up with 15 and Google with 12. A handful of patents were co-owned.
Foreign companies therefore benefit from public funding from Canada, underlined Mr. Hinton, and “no barrier prevents these foreign companies from plundering the very good Canadian innovation in AI”.
Researchers can also work simultaneously in AI institutes and in foreign technology companies, which allows technology giants to profit, he argued.
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, which coordinates the government’s AI strategy, disputes this assertion. Its director, Elissa Strome, maintains that “a small number of our researchers” also hold part-time jobs in the private sector.
Strome emphasizes that “a very strong firewall” is in place between publicly-generated intellectual property at AI institutes and that which is privately generated. And she disputes the accuracy of Mr. Hinton’s patent statistics, without providing data to refute his conclusions.
She also argued that patents are not a good measure of commercialization and that “it’s the people we train in the AI ecosystem who actually hold the greatest value in AI, not licences “.
As for sponsorship deals with Toronto’s Vector Institute, any intellectual property created “belongs to Vector,” a spokesperson said, adding that the institute is not the primary employer of most of its researchers.
He emphasized in a later statement that the institute had no relationship with IBM, Microsoft or Disney, and that Nvidia and Uber each had or previously had their own research labs in Canada.
If academics do not have the opportunity to work for companies, they are more likely to leave them completely, says the Mila Institute in Montreal. In a written statement, it is argued that these three institutes have in fact ended a “mass brain drain in the field of AI in Canada” that was occurring before 2017.
The multi-billion dollar investment in this year’s federal budget aims to further prevent this brain drain by strengthening Canada’s infrastructure and computing power.
The envelope includes a “relatively modest” amount to help Canadian businesses expand, said Paul Samson, president of the Center for International Governance Innovation. Overall, the government is “doing the right thing” by ensuring that is part of the equation, he said.
But those in the technology sector remain skeptical. Bergen of the Canadian Council of Innovators says companies have limited time to make their contribution. “The government already had a top-down strategy that it wanted to implement … and didn’t really care about what the CEOs and leaders of domestic companies actually needed to be successful,” he said.
Nicole Janssen, co-head of artificial intelligence company AltaML, expressed concern that the Canadian government could end up investing money in American companies to move north. “What I’m trying to understand is how the government thinks it’s spending 2 billion to build computers without just handing that 2 billion over to Microsoft,” she said.
The budget says the money would be used for both access to computing power and the development of Canadian-owned and Canadian-based AI infrastructure. A spokesperson for Industry Minister François-Philippe Champagne said more details would be provided in the coming weeks.
Janssen points out that companies like Microsoft and Nvidia are already looking to Canada as a place to build computing infrastructure, due to factors like climate and political stability. “We don’t have to do anything to attract them.”
