Did you know that over the last decade, the federal government has committed over half a billion dollars to a national AI strategy?
I’m not sure how many BetaKit readers are familiar with the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy by name, but they’re likely familiar with its outputs: national AI institutes Amii, Mila, and the Vector Institute, as well as AI commercialization work through the Global Innovation SuperClusters.
“This is a technology that now is directly impacting society every day and is impacting people’s lives. And if we’re going to help continue its development in a positive way, we actually need to be involved—not just on the technical side, but also on the policy and the societal impact side as well.”
Elissa Strome
CIFAR
Recently, at the ALL IN conference in Montréal (co-organized by Mila and innovation cluster Scale AI), I got a chance to speak with Elissa Strome, executive director at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) and the mastermind behind the strategy.
Strome was kind enough to walk me through CIFAR’s long history of doing this kind of work (its first research program on AI was in 1983), as well as the evolving motivations behind the strategy’s two phases.
Phase two and what comes next was a hot topic of conversation at ALL IN, with Mila CEO Valérie Pisano and Vector Institute CEO Tony Gaffney speculating on stage about what phase three could look like. For her part, Strome thinks CIFAR has “delivered on our objectives” for phase two, and opened her wishlist notebook for phase three on the pod: continuing “deep investments” into “the core of research and talent,” while targeting gaps and opportunities to ensure Canada’s AI ecosystem is “successful and competitive.”
“With a billion dollars you could do a lot,” she told me.
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But let’s jump back to phase two for a second. At my ALL IN panel (which I hope we can syndicate soon on the channel), the AI startups present took issue with the state of the country’s AI commercialization, along with procurement and investment. Sure, the feds are committing $2.4 billion, but Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, and Alphabet spent $104 billion USD on CapEx in H1 2024 alone, predominantly on AI infrastructure. That’s a massive delta.
Then there’s Bill C-27 and its Artificial Intelligence and Data Act (AIDA), which isn’t technically part of the AI strategy, but was announced alongside phase two in June 2022. Two years later, AIDA is nowhere to be found, and ALL IN speakers from Yoshua Bengio to former attorney general David Lametti put long odds on a reemergence (this was also a topic of conversation a week later at the AI-focused Competition Summit). This is beyond CIFAR’s scope, but with Canada currently being outpaced by the state of California on AI regulation, Canadian researchers, non-profits, and startups are finding themselves stuck in the grey areas.
So while Canada was one of the first countries to lay out a national AI strategy, it finds itself once again behind on regulation, commercialization, and capitalization. Phase three of any strategy will have to account for components phase two failed to deliver on or ignored because they didn’t exist yet, while scoping for what doesn’t exist now in a highly competitive global environment. That’s a big ask.
Again, much of this is far outside CIFAR’s remit, and the gaps between strategy, policy, and execution are both wide and difficult to navigate. But Strome is clearly thinking about all of it, and was willing to speak to me in detail about most of it.
So what’s in Elissa Strome’s notebook and can it solve for the future of AI while that future is still being written?
Let’s dig in.
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The BetaKit Podcast is hosted by Douglas Soltys & Rob Kenedi. Produced & edited by Jess Schmidt. Feature image courtesy ALL IN.