(Ottawa) Canada has an 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 specialist journalists as part of a podcast from the New York Times.
“We are proud of Canada’s pioneering role in the development of AI,” Mr. Trudeau said on “Hard Fork,” emphasizing that many breakthroughs took place 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 link research capacity with programs aimed at enabling commercialization.
This year’s federal budget included an additional $2.4 billion investment in AI. And the government boasted that Canada has 10% of the “best AI researchers in the world.”
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,” Mr. 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 this sector. Despite all this, Canada has not always been “good at marketing,” admitted Mr. Trudeau.
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 sums 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 intellectual property in AI to foreign companies”.
Patents leave the country
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 tries to quantify the 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 end up in the hands of “web giants,” according to M’s research.e 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% are 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 financing from Canada, underlined Mr.e Hinton, and “there are no barriers to stop these foreign companies from plundering Canada’s very good AI innovation.”
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.
Mme Strome points out that “a very strong firewall” is in place between the intellectual property generated by public funds at AI institutes and that which is generated by private funds. And she disputes the accuracy of M’s statisticse Hinton on patents, 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 “.
Curbing the brain drain
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 stressed in a subsequent statement that the institute had no relationship with IBM, Microsoft or Disney, and that Nvidia and Uber each had or had their own research labs in Canada.
If academics don’t have the opportunity to work for companies, they are more likely to leave them altogether, according to the Mila Institute in Montreal. A written statement argues 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 multibillion-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” in ensuring that is part of the equation, he said.
But those in the technology sector remain skeptical. Mr. Bergen, of the Canadian Council of Innovators, argues that companies have little 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 CEOs and leaders of domestic companies actually needed to be successful,” he said.
Nicole Janssen, co-CEO of artificial intelligence company AltaML, expressed concern that the Canadian government could end up investing money in American companies to set up shop north. “What I’m trying to understand is how the government thinks it’s going to spend $2 billion to build computers and not just hand 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.
Mme 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.”