Canada has been the worst performing advanced economy in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development since 1976. Governments of all partisan stripes have tried and failed to reverse the trend. If nothing changes, the OECD projects, our economic growth per capita will continue to stagnate for decades to come.
More than 90 per cent of graduates from Toronto’s Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence, funded by the program, have stayed in Ontario. University of Toronto professor Geoffrey E. Hinton, who is regarded as the godfather of artificial intelligence.By the 2010s, Canada was home to three renowned AI professors: Geoffrey Hinton at University of Toronto and Yoshua Bengio at Université de Montréal were both pioneers of deep learning, a branch of machine learning that simulates how the human brain works to learn from data.
“I realized AI would add more to the global economy than any technology since the microchip,” said Mr. Jacobs. Because foreign players siphoned it away, “not much economic value had been built in Canada.” The Google Inc. headquarters in Kitchener, Ont. in Sept. 2021. The campus is Google's biggest research and development office in Canada.Many AI experts stayed, but the foreign opportunities also came here. About 50 companies, including Facebook Inc., Google and Samsung Group, opened AI labs in Canada. Researchers no longer had to emigrate to do cutting-edge work. Mr. Bernstein welcomed them and maintains foreign giants are an essential ingredient of a “rich, confident ecosystem.
Mr. Hinton said that while other countries’ research institutions are busy patenting AI inventions, “Canada’s taxpayer-funded institutions are having virtually zero impact on commercialization benefits for Canada’s economy.” The key to generating value, Ms. Strome said, is training people to get jobs, launch startups and work “at Canadian companies and others in the ecosystem.”
Other participants in the AI strategy side with him. “IP is an important tool in building a competitive, defensive, profitable company,” a Vector spokesman said in an e-mail. In a blog last October, outgoing Vector CEO Garth Gibson wrote: “For countries, succeeding in the knowledge-based economy is about more than education and innovation. Increasingly it’s about securing and utilizing a nation’s intellectual property. That’s especially true in the era of AI.
Those and other national strategies have been explicit about something lacking from Canada’s initial AI strategy: commercialization, to ensure their economies benefit from adoption and exploitation of AI.
If the smart people, who are not focusing their careers on real estate, can't afford homes in Canada, they'll go work somewhere else.