Canada is investing $150M to make AI safer. Will it work? | CBC News

Lab building AI guardrails gets funding from federal government, Germany

Left unchecked, artificial intelligence could kill us all — that's the stark warning one of the godfathers of the technology, Yoshua Bengio, has been repeating for years. 

On Wednesday, standing next to representatives of the Canadian and German governments, they together announced over a quarter billion dollars to help the Canadian AI researcher fight that threat.

Bengio is trying to create a new kind of AI model. The model, called Scientist AI, is being developed to be safe by design: to focus purely on objective truths and understand facts without pursuing goals of its own — like pleasing its human user. It could also act as a guardrail for other AI models. 

The federal government is investing $150 million in LawZero, the Montreal-based non-profit launched by Bengio last year to build models like Scientist AI. It's the first time that federal funding has gone to the company. Germany is providing an additional 100 million euros.

"I'm doing this with the urgency that I feel in my bones, because I want my children and my grandchildren to have a future," said Bengio at the All In conference, a major gathering of AI leaders in Montreal this week. 

Concerns over AI's risks have been mounting, reaching a fever pitch after an outgoing researcher at Anthropic — one of the AI firms considered to be at the forefront of the technology — warned there is a chance AI could wipe out humanity in the next decade. 

In an interview with Bloomberg earlier this week, Prime Minister Mark Carney also called for a global, non-industry body to oversee and mitigate the technology's risks.

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Artificial Intelligence Minister Evan Soloman says the investment in LawZero is part of Canada's larger push for responsible AI development.

"We are here today not because we are responding to yesterday's headline, but because we are responding to the philosophic position that we have taken, which is to build responsibly and safely," he said.