Demetree

The Cohere story is not tall poppy syndrome. If Canada wanted sovereign AI, then we could easily create a RFP for highly competitive and well established players like NVDA, META, GOOGL, etc... to bid for building and maintaining the infrastructure while larger players, researchers, and startups gain access to compute. There is a big difference between Alberta attracting Meta to build a $13b data center with $0 taxpayer dollars vs. Federal government "investing" $1.6b of taxpayers funds into a highly-overvalued round where Brookfield and insiders like Dominic Barton bought early rounds and are using taxpayers as exit liquidity. What ends up happening instead is that regulatory capture takes place, a few big players get cherry picked, some low-tier infra gets built, a bunch of insiders get access, and the rest of the industry gets to go through 1000 bureaucratic loopholes instead of just grinding it out from a garage. You don't need billions to be a frontier lab. You need access to massive amounts of compute like GOOG, AMZN, A16Z, Dubai, and several other players are doing. This could easily be drafted into the incentive/competitive model to have large infrastructure players establish themselves in this country that has incredibly adversarial/unstable regulatory and industry framework. Right now, as-is, Canadians startups and researchers have very limited access to this, and the gap continues to grow wider between companies that get to bed with government vs. grassroot innovators. The latter, just leaves and goes to SF, NYC, and every other hub that's actually being competitive instead of bootlicking the socialist regime. Canada won't become a prosperous free-market economy until we change every inch of this entrenched culture. Accepting this status-quo culture is how we continually fail to get past this mediocre reality.