Hi {{first_name}},

Ottawa is set to become a shareholder in Cohere, with an equity investment of up to $1.6 billion that Prime Minister Mark Carney announced in Montreal on Oct. 29.

I wrote last week that the money comes with conditions. Cohere agreed to keep its incorporation and headquarters in Canada and to add at least 1,000 technical jobs here by 2030. The Prime Minister's Office says the money will arrive in stages, with regular reporting on those commitments.

Germany's Schwarz Group led the funding round Ottawa is joining, and it aims to host Cohere's models on its German STACKIT cloud.

For more, including the $35.7-billion valuation and what the German hosting plan means for Canadian clients who want their data kept here:

→ Read: Ottawa’s $1.6 billion stake in Cohere comes with a promise to stay Canadian

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Canada's first national security policy in more than 20 years names cloud and AI compute among the technologies the country needs to control. Carney released it on Oct. 29, the same day as the Cohere announcement.

Jennifer Kervin writes that the Council of Canadian Innovators says the plan is largely silent on who will own those capabilities.

"If the technology and IP behind these capabilities are owned elsewhere, Canada's dependence has simply moved onshore," says Daniel Perry, the council's director of federal affairs.

For more, including the eight sectors in the plan and what the council wants from Ottawa's promised legislation:

→ Read: What Canada’s new security policy means for innovators

PataBid started out on Amazon Web Services. When CEO Melvin Newman worked out the cost after the startup credits ran out, he also noticed where everything lived. 

"All of this is running in Oregon," he says.

Jennifer Friesen writes that the Calgary construction estimating company moved its software onto hardware it owns in an Equinix facility in Calgary. Researcher Joshua van Es, writing in Policy Options, found two-thirds of more than 750 platforms used by Canadian organizations are run by companies the U.S. CLOUD Act can reach.

For more, including why a Canadian server alone doesn't settle the CLOUD Act question, and the $3.5-million bid a mentor priced overnight on a pizza box:

→ Read: Teaching AI to price a job you can’t afford to get wrong

Ottawa is adding $500 million over five years to the Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative, a federal program that helps businesses adopt AI. The expansion announced Oct. 22 covers Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

Jennifer Kervin writes that the new money takes total federal investment in the program to $700 million, with support aimed at five sectors including agriculture and manufacturing.

The Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) also announced $2.5 million from PrairiesCan, the federal Prairies development agency, to bring 25 new Prairie businesses into its AI adoption program.

For more, including the other three sectors and what one early beneficiary says the money did for its AI roadmap:

→ Read: Ottawa expands AI support across the Prairies

Some light reading before Wednesday night at the pub

Tech Wednesdays meetup expands across Canada and into the U.S. The free weekly pub meetup for people in tech, which started in Edmonton in 2023, opened chapters in Vancouver, Victoria, Saskatoon and San Francisco on Oct. 28. Calgary's will launch Nov. 4 at Greta Bar during Calgary Innovation Week, with Ottawa and Québec City to follow Nov. 18. There's no agenda and no speaker. The San Francisco launch filled all 40 of its spots.

Microsoft offers voluntary exit packages to 60,000 staff About a quarter of Microsoft's workforce is getting a buyout offer, and staff on select teams in Canada are eligible along with the U.S., India and Britain. The company is trying to cut costs while it invests heavily in AI. It said in July that it spent $41 billion from April to June and expected that to reach $50 billion from July to September. The spending didn't get an exit offer.

Wall Street tech rout deepens on doubts over AI spending Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta are on track to spend more than $700 billion on capital investment this year, according to analyst estimates. That's roughly the size of Belgium's economy. Alphabet shares fell 12% on Oct. 29, their worst day since the company went public in 2004. Investors spent the week asking the question your CFO asks about every AI pilot, with more zeros.

AI-as-a-service: Cybercriminals are trading prompts and deepfake tools instead of building models Cybersecurity intelligence company Flashpoint tracked more than 2.3 million posts about AI on illicit forums, marketplaces and chat apps in a single month, and almost 64,000 posts advertised AI tools for getting past know-your-customer identity checks with synthetic video and cloned voices. If your payment approvals still rest on recognizing the CFO's voice, call back on a number you already had.

AI arrives in Parliament: What Sweden's chatbot lawmakers could mean for Canada Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology built detectors trained on parliamentary language and estimate that 9.4% of Swedish parliamentary motions in the most recent session contained AI-assisted text, up from almost zero in 2021-22. The researchers report that none of the politicians involved disclosed it. The study is a preprint. If Parliament ever makes MPs disclose AI use, someone should check whether AI drafted that rule.

One interesting part of the Cohere deal is the payment schedule. The money comes in stages, tied to at least 1,000 technical jobs and $1.7 billion in Canadian computing by 2030, with regular reporting along the way.

Those milestones are public and countable. I hope that becomes the norm for all federal funding, including the $700 million in the Regional Artificial Intelligence Initiative. 

I'm sure someone can use AI to build a dashboard showing whether they're met. Ideally before 2030.

— David

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