Cultivating intelligence: Why Canada must grow, not just import, AI |
The D.B. Weldon Library at Western University in London, Ont.Scott Norsworthy/Scott Norsworthy
Vivek Goel is the president and vice-chancellor of the University of Waterloo. Mark Daley is the chief artificial intelligence officer and a professor in the department of computer science at Western University. They are co-chairs of the Council of Ontario Universities working group on AI.
Canada has a habit of inventing the future and then watching the rest of the world profit from it.
We did it with vaccines, letting our domestic manufacturing capacity erode, which caught us off guard in the pandemic. We did it with automobiles, ceding world-class production to global supply chains. Now we risk doing it again with artificial intelligence.
This isn’t for a lack of early vision. Decades of federal investment through agencies such as the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research nurtured many of the creators of the AI revolution, including Turing Award laureates Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Rich Sutton. Their students now lead AI labs from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen. Cohere, a company founded by Canadian Aidan Gomez that builds AI solutions, proves Canadian companies can compete globally.
But even with Cohere’s........