I'm not going to say that every single regulation would be great. I think that world is possible, what you're saying. I would say that all of the issues you listed are happening right now, in a world where Canada has no regulation. Clearly, in terms of being behind on adoption, in terms of being behind on Canadians trusting AI—I think that's often a well-reasoned trust, because they don't know if they should trust these systems and their work—in terms of commercialization, in terms of Canada leading the way on research but then not being able to commercialize, and in terms of not being able to hold on to the IP, those are all issues that I think would have been solvable by making sure we had maybe not regulation but policy on holding on to IP, for example, that we fund with our own research funding, for example, over the last 30 years.
I think some regulations could miss the boat. I think in the EU AI Act, there's a focus on the number of FLOPs for training, for example, the size of the database and the training run for an AI system. I think those kinds of regulations might miss the boat. You might be able to, with new algorithms, train a system way easier on way less data, for example.
So yes, I think some of them might lock in certain things that would not be ideal, but I think actually what we're seeing is an economy and an ecosystem desperate for better guidance and better guidelines to help usher in the use of these tools and the development and innovation with these tools.