Latest news with #Canadian-French
Calgary Herald
30-07-2025
- Business
- Calgary Herald
Canada commits funding to joint AI safety effort with the U.K.
Canada is collaborating with the U.K. on a new artificial intelligence safety initiative as the U.S. pushes its vision of a zero-sum AI race that will see it remove guardrails on development and deployment of the burgeoning technology. Article content On Wednesday, Canada announced that it will commit $1 million to a $29 million joint AI safety effort with the U.K. that will bankroll research and commercial projects focused on keeping advanced AI systems in line — in other words, ensuring that they operate safely, reliably, and in a useful way, and without unintended or harmful actions. Article content Article content Article content 'Together, we're advancing cutting-edge research to ensure (the) next generation of AI systems are not only powerful but also reliable — serving societies here at home and around the world,' said minister of AI and digital innovation Evan Solomon in a statement. Article content The initiative, called the AI Alignment Project, is spearheaded by the U.K.'s AI Security Institute (AISI) and will involve the Canadian AI Safety Institute (CAISI) under the umbrella of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), a research organization focussed on innovation and deep tech. Other financial backers include enterprise partners such as Amazon Web Services, Inc. and venture firm the Safe AI Fund, and non-profits such as New-York headquartered Schmidt Sciences, LLC. Article content The project will provide grant funding for researchers across disciplines including computer and cognitive science; help organizations and individuals access venture capital investment; and secure 'compute,' the computational power needed to train and run AI models. The call for proposals, which launches Wednesday, will be open until September. Article content Article content Prominent AI experts including Canadian-French computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, known as one of the 'godfathers of AI,' will serve on the advisory board to help steer the effort and to select the successful proposals by November. Article content Article content Canada's participation in the U.K.-led AI safety effort fits into Ottawa's broader AI vision for Canada — one that involves building trust in, and adoption of, the technology — and lets Canadian researchers have a seat at the table when it comes to global efforts on AI safety, according to Elissa Strome, executive director of pan-Canadian AI strategy at CIFAR. There are 'few challenges more urgent than ensuring AI is safe, predictable, and beneficial for all,' she said. Article content The launch of the new initiative takes place amid broader shifts in the conversation on AI. As the tech becomes an increasingly important feature of national security and economic competition, the U.S. has peddled a light-touch regulatory approach, while jurisdictions such as the EU have championed tougher-on-tech rules. Industry groups and AI safety scholars have also clashed over how AI should be regulated, developed and deployed.
Calgary Herald
09-07-2025
- Business
- Calgary Herald
What are AI agents and which jobs are they coming for first?
Article content Some in the industry are already working toward establishing guardrails to advance the development of safe and ethical AI. Canadian-French computer scientist Yoshua Bengio, considered one of the 'godfathers of AI,' recently launched a Montreal-based non-profit called LawZero focused on AI systems that will filter out certain traits like dishonesty. He aims to create a tool to de-risk AI agents and keep them in line. 'I'm deeply concerned by the behaviours that unrestrained agentic AI systems are already beginning to exhibit — especially tendencies toward self-preservation and deception,' Bengio wrote in a June 2025 blog post. Article content What is the timeline for rolling out agentic AI? Article content Agentic AI technology is nascent, but developing rapidly, Filan said. 'I'm not even thinking about what it would look like 10 years from now. Most of the conversations occurring now are between a two-to-five-year period,' he said. Article content Article content A growing number of startups are now developing AI agents customized for different professional and personal needs. Partners at Silicon Valley's fabled startup accelerator Y Combinator LLC, recently said that they have been bombarded with a wide range of AI agent proposals in fields ranging from marketing to recruitment and debt collection. Article content Silicon Valley leaders have warned that job displacement is coming rapidly. Anthropic PBC chief executive Dario Amodei told Axios in May 2025 that he thought AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment to 10 to 20 per cent in the next one to five years. Article content Others say agentic AI technology has a ways to go. Article content Article content A May 2025 Carnegie Mellon paper showed that Google LLC's Gemini 2.5 Pro, the top-performing AI agent, was unsuccessful 70 per cent of the time in completing real-world office tasks. Other rival agents created by tech giants like OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc. had failure rates of over 90 per cent. Article content 'Right now, we're seeing early glimpses: AI agents can already analyze data, predict trends, and automate workflows to some extent. But building AI agents that can autonomously handle complex decision-making will take more than just better algorithms. We'll need big leaps in contextual reasoning and testing for edge cases,' according to a March 2025 International Business Machines Corp. report titled AI Agents in 2025: Expectations vs. Reality.
Euronews
04-06-2025
- General
- Euronews
AI pioneer launches non-profit to develop safe-by-design AI models
One of the world's most cited artificial intelligence (AI) researchers is launching a new non-profit that will design safe AI systems. Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian-French AI scientist who has won the prestigious Alan Turing Prize for his work on deep learning and has been dubbed one of the "godfathers" of AI, announced the launch of LawZero in Montreal. The new non-profit is assembling a "world-class" team of AI researchers that is dedicated to "prioritising safety over commercial imperatives," a statement from the non-profit reads. "Today's frontier AI models are developing dangerous capabilities and behaviours, including deception, self-preservation, and goal misalignment," Bengio said in the statement, noting that the organisation will help unlock the "immense potential" of AI while reducing these risks. Bengio said the non-profit was born of a new "scientific direction" he took in 2023, which has culminated in "Scientist AI," a new non-agentic AI system he and his team are developing to act as a guardrail against "uncontrolled" agentic AI systems. This principle is different than other companies in that it wants to prioritise non-agentic AIs, meaning it needs direct instructions for each task instead of independently coming up with the answers, like most AI systems. The non-agentic AIs built by LawZero will "learn to understand the world rather than act in it," and will be trained to give "truthful answers to questions based on [external] reasoning". Bengio elaborated on Scientist AI in a recent opinion piece for Time, where he wrote that he is "genuinely unsettled by the behaviour unrestrained AI is already demonstrating, in particular self-preservation and deception". "Rather than trying to please humans, Scientist AI could be designed to prioritise honesty," he wrote. The organisation has received donations from other AI institutes like the Future of Life Institute, Jaan Tallin, and the Silicon Valley Community Foundation in its incubator phase. LawZero will be working out of the MILA - Quebec AI Institute in Montreal, which Bengio helped co-found.
