OpenAI for Countries<\/a> is explicitly described by the company as an initiative \u201cin co-ordination with the U.S. government.\u201d And it\u2019s not just OpenAI: all the AI giants are for-profit American companies, operating in their private interests, and subject to United States law and increasingly bowing to U.S. President Donald Trump. Moving data centres into Canada under a proposal like OpenAI\u2019s doesn\u2019t change that. The current geopolitical reality means Canada should not be dependent on U.S. tech firms for essential services such as cloud computing and AI.<\/p>\nWhile there are Canadian AI companies, they remain for-profit enterprises, their interests not necessarily aligned with our collective good. The only real alternative is to be bold and invest in a wholly Canadian public AI: an AI model built and funded by Canada for Canadians, as public infrastructure. This would give Canadians access to the myriad of benefits from AI without having to depend on the U.S. or other countries. It would mean Canadian universities and public agencies building and operating AI models optimized not for global scale and corporate profit, but for practical use by Canadians. <\/p>\n
Imagine AI embedded into health care, triaging radiology scans, flagging early cancer risks and assisting doctors with paperwork. Imagine an AI tutor trained on provincial curriculums, giving personalized coaching. Imagine systems that analyze job vacancies and sectoral and wage trends, then automatically match job seekers to government programs. Imagine using AI to optimize transit schedules, energy grids and zoning analysis. Imagine court processes, corporate decisions and customer service all sped up by AI.<\/p>\n
We are already on our way to having AI become an inextricable part of society. To ensure stability and prosperity for this country, Canadian users and developers must be able to turn to AI models built, controlled, and operated publicly in Canada instead of building on corporate platforms, American or otherwise.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u200bSwitzerland has shown this to be possible. With funding from the federal government, a consortium of academic institutions \u2013 ETH Zurich, EPFL, and the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre \u2013 released the world\u2019s most powerful and fully realized public AI model, Apertus, last September. Apertus leveraged renewable hydropower and existing Swiss scientific computing infrastructure. It also used no illegally pirated copyrighted material or poorly paid labour extracted from the Global South during training. The model\u2019s performance stands at roughly a year or two behind the major corporate offerings, but that is more than adequate for the vast majority of applications. And it\u2019s free for anyone to use and build on.<\/p>\n
\u200bThe significance of Apertus is more than technical. It demonstrates an alternative ownership structure for AI technology, one that allocates both decision-making authority and value to national public institutions rather than foreign corporations. This vision represents precisely the paradigm shift Canada should embrace: AI as public infrastructure, like systems for transportation, water, or electricity, rather than private commodity.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Apertus also demonstrates a far more sustainable economic framework for AI. Switzerland spent a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars that corporate AI labs invest annually, demonstrating that the frequent training runs with astronomical price tags pursued by tech companies are not actually necessary for practical AI development. They focused on making something broadly useful rather than bleeding edge \u2013 trying dubiously to create \u201csuperintelligence,\u201d as with Silicon Valley \u2013 so they created a smaller model at much lower cost. Apertus\u2019s training was at a scale (70 billion parameters) perhaps two orders of magnitude lower than the largest Big Tech offerings.<\/p>\n
An ecosystem is now being developed on top of Apertus, using the model as a public good to power chatbots for free consumer use and to provide a development platform for companies prioritizing responsible AI use, and rigorous compliance with laws like the EU AI Act. Instead of routing queries from those users to Big Tech infrastructure, Apertus is deployed to data centres across national AI and computing initiatives of Switzerland, Australia, Germany, and Singapore and other partners.<\/p>\n
The case for public AI rests on both democratic principles and practical benefits. Public AI systems can incorporate mechanisms for genuine public input and democratic oversight on critical ethical questions: how to handle copyrighted works in training data, how to mitigate bias, how to distribute access when demand outstrips capacity, and how to license use for sensitive applications like policing or medicine. Or how to handle a situation such as that of the Tumbler Ridge shooter. These decisions will profoundly shape society as AI becomes more pervasive, yet corporate AI makes them in secret.<\/p>\n
By contrast, public AI developed by transparent, accountable agencies would allow democratic processes and political oversight to govern how these powerful systems function.<\/p>\n
Canada already has many of the building blocks for public AI. The country has world-class AI research institutions, including the Vector Institute, Mila, and CIFAR, which pioneered much of the deep learning revolution. Canada\u2019s $2-billion Sovereign AI Compute Strategy provides substantial funding.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s needed now is a reorientation away from viewing this as an opportunity to attract private capital, and toward a fully open public AI model.<\/p>\n
Prosperity\u2019s Path<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nathan Sanders is a data scientist affiliated with the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University. Bruce Schneier is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":508745,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,175522,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-508744","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-prosperitys-path","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508744","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/508745"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}