Industry committee  Absolutely. Thank you for the question. I think it's a great question. We all struggle with understanding what AI is, partly because we are prone to thinking that it's one thing, and it's not. With respect to what is in part 3, or AIDA, right now, I think you have two pieces.

Industry committee  Yes, that's correct. In my mind, it's not patterned after the Privacy Commissioner, which is more of a police officer, you might say. It's more that there's not one AI, and AI is not just affecting one department. The question was asked about whether it should be in ISED. It's technology, so it makes sense that this is the place, but it is very difficult to understand technology and it filters across all the rest of government.

Industry committee  Yes.

Industry committee  Social media is not an area of expertise for me. All I would say is that I don't know of a lot of social media platforms that are based here in Canada, so this would be an exercise in regulating foreign companies and so on. We know that's difficult to do, but to me, it makes sense.

Industry committee  My opinion on that, as you've had other witnesses here in front of this committee say, is that Canadian industry is very slow to make these sorts of decisions in the first place. They see this regulation now, and they don't want to do things that are going to get them into trouble, so for sure there is some hesitation.

Industry committee  I think it's important for this law not to layer on top of the laws that we already have. If you look at President Biden's executive order, you can see that he has created a great list of the various departments of government where AI is already relating to workers and relating to privacy.

Industry committee  Sure. I'm not sure that government has the capacity to do that. That's not necessarily a criticism. I don't know that it's the government's job to build supercomputers. What the government should be doing is facilitating private industry to do those things and to perhaps be setting out rules.

Industry committee  There's an arms race right now, so to speak, with these large models, but common sense tells you that when things get too big and too expensive, innovation takes you in the other direction. I don't know if anyone is familiar with small language models, for example. They're actually much better at targeted tasks than these large language models.

Industry committee  I'm an engineer by training, so I take a very practical approach. We here in Canada are not going to change what happens outside of our borders with our regulations. We need to balance these important harms with a mind to making sure.... We need to create more Shopifys and more Coveos.

Industry committee  Essentially, yes. The whole world is going to have to work together. We can be first, but if we're going in the wrong direction, it's not going to help Canadian businesses to do that. If you look at what's happening in the U.S. and EU, the rush is to get the infrastructure in place, but nobody really wants to be the first one to jump into the boiling pot on regulating the technology because nobody knows what's going to happen.