(Ottawa) Canada has an impressive research capacity. It has billions of dollars in public funding. But when it comes to transforming its vast knowledge 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.
Posted at 1:34 p.m.
Anja Karadeglija
The Canadian Press
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 specialized journalists as part of a podcast show from the New York Times, Hard Fork.
“We are proud of Canada’s pioneering role in the development of AI,” declared Mr. Trudeau, 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.”
But Ottawa is “fighting to make sure it stays in the game,” Mr. Trudeau admitted to the hosts of Hard Fork. He stressed that Canada has many of the ingredients that AI needs: clean energy, a good quality of life for workers and government programs to encourage the sector, among others. Despite all this, Canada has not always been “good at commercialization,” Trudeau acknowledged.
Benjamin Bergen, president of the Canadian Council of Innovators, which represents the technology sector, even believes that Canadians are “far behind”.
Patents are leaving the country
The government’s strategy update, published in 2022, calls for the country’s three AI institutes to “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 have. »
Intellectual property lawyer Jim Hinton attempts to quantify this problem. About three-quarters of patents produced by researchers working at Toronto’s Vector Institute and Montreal’s Mila Institute leave the country, and most of them are in the hands of ‘web giants,’ research shows of Me Hinton.
Furthermore, 18% of the 244 patents it tracked – 198 from Vector and 46 from Mila – now belong to North American academic institutions. Only 7% is held by the Canadian private sector.
Of the patents held by foreigners, the largest number, 65, went to Uber, while 35 landed at the Walt Disney Company. Nvidia, which recently overtook Microsoft as the world’s largest stock market capitalization, got 34. IBM got 15 and Google got 12. A handful of patents were co-owned.
Foreign companies therefore benefit from public funding from Canada, 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 foreign technology companies, allowing tech giants to profit, he argued.
The Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, which is coordinating the government’s AI strategy, disputes that claim. Its director, Elissa Strome, says a “small number of our researchers” also have 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.
Curbing the brain drain
As for sponsorship deals with the 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 don’t have the opportunity to work for companies, they are more likely to leave them altogether, the Mila Institute says. A written statement argues that the country’s three institutes have effectively 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.
