Raquel Urtasun believes the time is now for Canada to go “all in” on physical AI, and that doing so could make the country a global player in the coming decades.
Speaking with University of Toronto president Melanie Woodin at BetaKit’s Most Ambitious: Town Hall, the Waabi founder and CEO told audiences that the world is on the precipice of a physical AI revolution not unlike the generative one ushered in by OpenAI’s ChatGPT a few years ago.
“In the digital world, things have, since 2022’s ChatGPT moment, evolved significantly. In physical AI, that revolution is happening now,” she said.
“Imagine you have the crystal ball before the ChatGPT moment. That’s where we are now.”
Raquel Urtasun, Waabi
Urtasun’s Toronto-based company is at the forefront of that physical AI revolution. Waabi develops AI systems for autonomous vehicles, such as transport trucks and robotaxis. Acting as the “brain” of these early forays into an autonomous Internet of Things, Waabi has been backed by tech giants like Uber, Volvo, and Nvidia, raising more than $1 billion CAD in funding and deploying its AI across swaths of the United States.
Urtasun initially moved to Canada, from Spain, to be near the beating heart of AI research, but told Woodin that Canada had struggled to capitalize on many of the advances its own researchers had helped lay the foundation for. That, she said, doesn’t have to be the case with autonomous transportation.
“Imagine you have the crystal ball before the ChatGPT moment. That’s where we are now. We actually have the crystal ball, so we should just go all in,” she said. “We have a tremendous opportunity to not only be a part of the equation, but to lead what this transportation of the future is.”
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Urtasun said that Canada has the “important pieces” needed to blaze a trail in transportation’s future, citing companies like her own as important players, but also companies like Magna International, a Canadian automotive tech company and supplier, and BlackBerry’s QNX operating system that already serves as a software foundation for millions of vehicles globally.
“What I would love to see is more startup companies emerging in this field, because there is so much capital that we can attract, and such incredible talent in Toronto and Canada, that we could become that key player that dictates what’s going to be,” she said.
And that matters to Canada’s sovereignty, because, as Urtasun puts it, having control over movement is control over destiny.“Transportation is something core … we want to make sure we can move goods, people, we can move things around regardless of how the geopolitics of the world evolves over the next few years,” she said.
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Feature image courtesy Lilac for BetaKit.