I have been all over Canada for the last few weeks attending the nation’s tech events.
One of those events was the Upper Bound AI conference, hosted in sunny Edmonton to a record-breaking 6,000 people. The Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) organized the event, and this week on the podcast, we have Amii CEO Cam Linke.
Recorded live from Amii’s wonderful office space, we discuss the growth of Upper Bound, Amii’s role in the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy, and how it works with and stands out from the two other National AI Institutes, Vector and Mila. Hogwarts comparisons may have been made.
“Be a customer of Canadian startups. This is the thing that every company needs. Nobody died from having too many customers.”
Amii announced a major partnership with Google on AI literacy at Upper Bound, so we also discuss that alongside the proliferation of AI in academia, as well as AI as the next step of human evolution (that’s according to Amii chief scientific advisor and recent Turing Award winner, Richard Sutton, whose keynote closed the event).
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I couldn’t let Linke leave without also sharing his thoughts on what phase three of the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy should look like (especially since phase two was drafted before the Gen AI boom), the role of regulation (and where Bill C-27 and its AIDA provision failed), and the impact of a new federal AI minister with a national mandate to push adoption.
In Canada’s AI houses, is Amii a Hufflepuff or a Ravenclaw?
Let’s dig in.
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The BetaKit Podcast is edited by Darian MacDonald. Feature image courtesy Amii via X.