Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks during an announcement on innovation for economic growth in advance of the 2024 federal budget in Montreal on April 7.Joël Blit is a professor of economics at the University of Waterloo and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. Jimmy Lin is the Cheriton Chair at the Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo and the co-director of Waterloo AI., a month can change everything.
Canada’s aspirations of building homegrown LLMs that can generate revenues while promoting Canadian values need to be re-evaluated. Not only is $2-billion woefully insufficient, but it is also difficult to compete with free LLMs. The good news is that Canada can still win in the AI space. But to do so, Canada must shift its focus to the application layer of the AI stack. We can succeed by leveraging AI to increase the efficiency of our businesses and by building startups that reimagine entire industries around AI.
Crucially, most of the adoption will not require building LLMs from scratch. Most businesses will be able to leverage the power of AI through simple prompt engineering, while more ambitious companies may choose to start with an open-source model such as Llama 3 and fine-tune it for their purposes.