Industry committee  Yes, I mentioned urgency many times in my little presentation because you have to understand AI not as a static thing where we are now but as the trajectory that is happening in research and development, mostly in large companies but also in academia. As these systems become smarter and more powerful, their abilities have dual use, and that means more good and more harm can happen.

Industry committee  Maybe the shortest-term concern that was a priority, for example, for the experts consulted by the World Economic Forum just a few weeks ago is disinformation. An example is the current use of deep fakes in AI to imitate images of people by imitating their voices and rendering their movement in video and interacting with people through texts and through dialogue in a way that can fool a social media user and make them change their mind on political questions.

Industry committee  Either way is fine.

Industry committee  No. I think it's very important to cover the general purpose AI systems in particular, because they could be the most dangerous if misused. This is the place where there is also the most uncertainty about the harms that could follow from these systems. I think that having a law that says more oversight is necessary for these general purpose systems will also be an encouragement for developers to create more specialized systems.

Industry committee  Thank you, Mr. Chair. Good morning. First, I want to say how much I appreciate this opportunity to meet with the committee. My name is Yoshua Bengio, and I am a full professor at Université de Montréal, as well as the founder and scientific director of Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute.

Science and Research committee  Thanks for asking. The strings would be first on the topics. Right now, if you look at R and D tax credits or superclusters.... I mean, superclusters are somewhat in a limited area, but overall, the money is spread out very broadly, and that can have nice advantages. However, for these moon shots, that's not what we need.

Science and Research committee  Yes, for these kinds of licences, one example I know about is the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is a huge funder of moon shot things and it has such clauses. I think other foundations have similar things.

Science and Research committee  I already mentioned the cell atlas project. Let me mention another organization that was recently created in the U.S., called BARDA. I don't remember exactly the breakdown of the acronym, but it's like “Biomedical Advanced Research” something. What it's meant to do is fund mission-oriented research and development to protect Americans from potential biomedical threats.

Science and Research committee  This is a great question. I wish I had answers, but let me try something. I had a sentence in my pitch about the lack of an innovation culture in everything that has to do with government services. I don't know how to fix this, but Canadians need the services our governments give to be improving and getting better.

Science and Research committee  Let me answer maybe partially by telling you about a particular kind of moon shot that happened recently around what's called a cell atlas. It was about mapping out what different cells in different organisms were doing. This is of interest to both academics and the pharmaceutical industry.

Science and Research committee  Yes. I completely agree. To come back to the previous question about the Montreal declaration, one thing we talked about, which I think is really important for the development of responsible AI and also when we fund expensive research, is transparency—transparency on the process to decide where we invest, transparency on how the work is done, and transparency on the results.

Science and Research committee  It's quite good. In my opinion, that is not where the problems lie. There are more problems in fields like health data, where it is obviously very fragmented. There are other problems elsewhere, but I will leave it at that for now.

Science and Research committee  I think we have incredible opportunities in Canada that enable us to distinguish ourselves even more as compared to what we have already done. I am talking not only about fundamental research, in which we are already a very impressive leader, but also about developing innovations that are going to affect society directly.

Science and Research committee  I have several examples. The IPCC is doing an amazing job in the area of climate to point out problems and areas that need more effort. Here in Canada we have an organization that has been extraordinary. It funds moon shot research at a very small scale. That's CIFAR, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Science and Research committee  I think that certain priorities can be and actually are being dictated by the market. However, because of the market failures that I explained, there are needs that are not being properly met and sectors that are being poorly served. The government can act as a spark plug to get things moving.