Waabi CEO Raquel Urtasun thinks it’s time for physical artificial intelligence (AI), including robotics and self-driving vehicles, to get its due in Canada.
The autonomous vehicle (AV) startup CEO said a lack of attention to physical AI in the Canadian government’s AI strategy would be a “massive miss” and called for faster regulatory development.
Raquel Urtasun
“I want this company to remain, as much as possible, Canadian.”
Waabi
“It’s great to see Canada trying to have a leadership and strategy in AI and a new AI minister, but I will argue that if you look at what’s happening over here, there’s nothing in physical AI,” Urtasun said.
Urtasun made the remarks at Homecoming, the flagship event of Toronto Tech Week, on a panel alongside Sanja Fidler, vice-president (VP) of AI research at Nvidia, and Mike Murchison, CEO of Canadian AI company Ada.
In an interview with BetaKit after the talk, Urtasun claimed that Canadian institutions have yet to realize that the physical AI revolution is here.
“This is happening now,” Urtasun said. “Canada, wake up.”
She added that the Canadian government should bring forward a regulatory framework quickly to ensure the responsible deployment of AI-powered physical technologies, such as self-driving vehicles.
Waabi has developed an AI-powered physical intelligence platform to operate autonomous trucks. The company says its tech uses synthetic data and a digital twin of the physical environment to train its trucks to anticipate scenarios. Waabi claims it can build digital twins of the world with 99.7 percent accuracy.
But the company has had to focus on United States (US)-based clients to pilot its tech, in part because Canada does not have the regulatory framework to support autonomous long-haul trucks, Urtasun said.
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“We can’t deploy in Canada—nowhere,” she said on the Homecoming panel. “We don’t even have the choice.”
In the US, there is no overarching federal regulation, but Urtasun said more than 30 states can support Waabi’s trucks.
Amid a stronger emphasis on AI within government, Prime Minister Mark Carney appointed the country’s first AI and digital innovation minister, Evan Solomon. Solomon recently said that the Canadian government would not overindex on AI regulation to the detriment of innovation.
Urtasun envisions an environment where companies like hers could take a safety-first approach to all proposals that impact the public, such as those having to do with road infrastructure. Urtasun has previously called for greater attention to safety through more standardized realism metrics for AV companies. Her company has created a standard by which Waabi and its Silicon Valley competitors can evaluate the accuracy of their own simulators.
The Waabi CEO also appealed to Canadian investors to fill in the gaps for pre-revenue companies making “big bets” on physical AI.
“We have a nice early-stage [venture capital] community, we have the pension plans once you’re into massive revenue, but we have a hole in between,” Urtasun said on stage at Homecoming.
Urtasun’s comments come as a theme emerges about deep tech companies in Canada not getting what they believe is their fair share of funding. At the BetaKit Town Hall: Most Ambitious during Toronto Tech Week, SRTX founder Katherine Homuth called for VC investors to fund more deep tech and manufacturing companies at higher valuations, similar to their counterparts in software.
RELATED: Waabi develops realism metric to gauge reliability of autonomous vehicle simulators
As a result of this gap, pre-revenue companies that are more capital-intensive are relying heavily on US and international funding, Urtasun said. Many of Waabi’s investors from its most recent $275-million Series B were non-Canadian, including key industry players such as Volvo and Porsche.
“I want this company to remain, as much as possible, Canadian,” Urtasun told BetaKit.
Urtasun’s comments echoed others throughout Homecoming, such as the need to build global companies headquartered in Canada. Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez encouraged Canadian tech companies to say no to incorporating in the US and stop doing what he called giving away Canadian ingenuity for free.
Fidler, Urtasun’s co-panellist and co-founding member of the Toronto-based AI research organization Vector Institute, said part of the reason why they started it in 2016 was to combat brain drain of “amazing” Canadian research talent to the US.
For Urtasun, the thriving AI research community in Canada could be enhanced through immigration policies that ease the pathways for top AI talent to move to Canada.
“We have an immense opportunity because we see a lot of talent in the US wanting to come to Canada,” Urtasun said.
BetaKit is the official media partner of Toronto Tech Week.
Feature image courtesy Jon Fingas for BetaKit.