That's a great question.
Patent collectives are about freedom to operate. To quickly answer the question, within the AI sector there's already pretty good freedom to operate, and there may not be many benefits there.
With respect to freedom to operate, think about yourself separated from a commercialization opportunity by a field full of land mines that are patents, essentially. You want to get across that field. Either you need to navigate carefully between all of those potential dangers or you need to clear a path by acquiring patents, knocking them out or whatever else. This is freedom to operate.
Patents touch each industry differently. If you're in pharmaceuticals, they're going to be very up front and personal, and at the other end of the spectrum, in software and AI, it's different.
It's important to understand a few things about AI.
First, AI is not a technology. It's an idea, and it's essentially a basket of a bunch of different kinds of math.
The second thing to understand is that AI is really old. The people who invented it are all dead, and the people who came after them have really long, white hair. From a patent perspective, we patent things that are new, not things that are old. That means a lot of stuff is already out there available to be used, without fear of patent rights.
The third thing to understand is that it's really hard to patent AI because it falls in this funny space where patent law says you can't patent math, algorithms and stuff like that, so it can be quite difficult. There are many patent applications being filed, but the failure rate on just getting those patents from application to a granted patent is extremely high.
The point is that when you talk about a collective trying to create this freedom to operate a corridor across a field, you have many different fields because there are so many different types of AI. The patent population in that field is not at the same level as you might have somewhere else. If you turn, for example, to a burgeoning technology like quantum computing, on which Canada is really at the forefront, it's going to be very hardware-focused, and this a potential opportunity.
I should back up quickly. I neglected to mention one really important thing about AI, and that is that the whole AI infrastructure is built on something called open source, which is software freely available to be used. I could open my laptop right now and, with just a few lines of code, create an AI that would parse, for example, all of the testimony of this committee and help generate some reflections and so on. Open source creates large corridors of freedom to operate already, and when you have all that, the addition of a patent collective doesn't seem to offer much further benefit. However, there may be some other areas where it does.