Hate speech is the least of his crimes if his words are true. He should be on trial for what he claims to have done.

Put him on trial. Prepare the gallows for if his words are true. Should be that simple. Precedents from Nuremberg, Dachau, Krakow etc.

Consider that Canada’s position was to accept having Israel investigate itself in the first place, while Israel is actively working all the time to undermine fundamental systems of international law and is engaged in genocide. Canadian foreign policy wrt Israel is and has been utterly pathetic. How many times has Anand squirmed her way through interviews and official statements trying to look like the government she’s part of gives a shit while actually defending the practices and standards of the Israeli government as the Israeli government displays constant contempt for international law and for Canada?

They use pictures of Romeo Dallaire much more than they use his words in the article, but both his books are very worthwhile reading. Dallaire is a Canadian hero who tried to actually live up to Canada’s peacekeeping brand, and who was then crushed when he ran into the true emptiness of the promise behind the brand.

Of course, TSMC is also doing incredibly well out of manufacturing, but not as well as Nvidia which still has like 75% margins on their GPUs and nets like 50% on them. Not sure what Google’s margins are on their TPUs, but I’m sure they’re also high and they are making huge returns on serving inference.

As to the Canadian compound semiconductor fab, it seems great and may be very worthwhile, but again it’s pretty small potatoes in the industry:

A detailed economic analysis indicates that a commercial-scale compound semiconductor fab could generate 10,000 new jobs, $10–15 billion in GDP over ten years

Nvidia’s profits last year were 10× the upper bound of what the potential Canadian fab is promoting as a possible 10-year gross impact on GDP.

The industry is a point where capital demands and returns are so extreme that GPU access is having to be sold like bonds to the biggest asset managers on the planet just to feed the CAPEX to meet demand, and that’s a big part of why the frontier is a two-horse race that we’re not in. Again, that’s not to say Canadian businesses can’t make money during all this, but the players that are going to dominate this space are not coming from Canada.

Follies and failures are a normal part of any period of explosive change and growth. That’s the nature of markets. What matters long-term is who comes out on top in the end. Whoever comes out on top in an industrial revolution also comes out with enormous economic and military leverage over anyone who lagged behind. Now, we can take a cautious approach where we try to never set a foot wrong by regulating everything to a T (and it would have to be done via massive regulatory restriction, because this is a market-led revolution and not a state-led revolution), but that won’t make us win in the long-run. So, if you want to think of what happened during the industrial revolution, consider what happened to countries that fell behind during the industrial revolution. That is a big part of what’s missing in your analysis of how Canada is positioned relative to the US. The US is in a period of instability as they revamp their whole industrial and financial policy approach, but US tech is positioned to be winners of this industrial revolution and to have massive leverage over Canada in the long-term because of it.

To be clear, I don’t like this and if it were up to me we would slow all AI development down until we could provide the power supply from renewables while making social and political adjustments to ensure the benefits could be widely distributed. But, it’s not up to me and I can only call it as I see it.

This isn’t really a matter of killer apps. It’s a general purpose technology. And, to be clear, Cohere is a good business and they’re doing well focusing on enterprise. I’m not knocking them. Still, they’re on a similar timeline to profitability as Anthropic, at wildly different scale. Cohere was around $250M ARR last year. Anthropic is on track for something like $60B ARR this year and $140B ARR next year. The idea that profitability isn’t there is just wrong. And that’s just the model providers, but if you look at Cohere’s business model that has enterprises invest in sourcing their own instead of getting inference from Cohere, who are they getting the compute from? They’re either buying GPUs/TPUs made by a US tech giant, or they’re renting compute from a US tech giant, or if they’re actually renting compute from a Canadian tech giant then that tech giant is buying GPUs/TPUSls from a US tech giant. No matter how you slice it, US tech is winning.

The winning horse, I’m sad to say, is not coming from Canada. Unless Rich’s new lab disproves his bitter lesson, we are not in the race. Cohere is valued at $7B. Anthropic is expected to go public at $2T. Cohere can make a lot of money by focusing on strengths they have that are practical business applications, but there’s a reason Anthropic’s valuation is coming in at 285× Cohere. And, we don’t have much else while the US has OpenAI, xAI, Google DeepMind, Meta and more, not to mention owning the hardware layer with Nvidia. It’s not even close. Even if a lab taking a divergent approach achieves an incredible breakthrough, where do you think the capital to scale will come from? We don’t have the depth of capital markets domestically to compete at the top end of this. It is a two horse race because there are only two horses with the combined frontier tech and capital to run the race.

And, wrt to the dotcom bubble, it popping didn’t stop the internet from being revolutionary and it didn’t stop the US tech from dominating the internet. We are very likely heading the same direction, but with China as a competitor this time and a more fragmented global market.

I think your read on AI investment is quite far off. We are in the midst of a new industrial revolution, and the two players leading it are the US and China. Canada is basically on par with the US as a leading country in terms of uptake of AI and usage by consumers, but Canadians aren’t using Canadian AI. How many people are using Cohere on a daily basis as compared to OpenAI or Anthropic? How many unsolved math equations are being solved by Cohere? There won’t be any left for Cohere to solve because they’re getting solved at the frontier and we are not there. This gap is not shrinking. Cohere’s top model is on par with Haiku, not Fable. It’s so far down it doesn’t even appear in most rankings unless you look at very specific use cases, like having low hallucination rates on RAG. So, sure, we have exports like aluminum, O&G, REEs, and electricity that the US needs, but the frontier of innovation where all the new economic value is being generated is down south and in China, and a huge amount of the AI investment in Canada on AI data centres is with US capital and US tech. So, our relationship is not changing much in that regard. We have long been an exporter of inputs to higher value processes, and we look to be continuing as such while the US continues to drive the frontier of value creation and US corporates own the IP and the infrastructure.

And, btw, Chinese AI labs are not just focused on niche applications and there is massive investment in China towards building frontier chips and infrastructure, not to mention physical AI, and we should be glad of that. If not for Chinese labs pumping out near-frontier open models, the US labs could basically lock up the market right now. As Chinese chip fabs improve, their capacity to compete on chips will do the same in making hardware markets more open and competitive, and we should be very glad of that, too. We already face enormous pressure to just be a supplier of inputs to a US-controlled tech revolution. We are really the ones who are trying to compete on niches, like some quantum and narrow application AI models, while predominantly feeding inputs into the general purpose tech development driving demand.

The problem we currently have with catalyzing $1T of investment into Canada is that when the government is betting so much political capital on making Canada attractive to financial capital, we’re likely going to see very weak enforcement from the ICA on key industries and ownership/control structures, which means we could see the FDI flying up and people celebrating it like Canada’s doing so well even as core industries and players are moving out of Canadian control.

I totally disagree.

Empathy co-exists with self-preservation and boundary setting. Your example of people on a subway says nothing about empathy. Not wanting people to talk to you says nothing about empathy. Empathy does not demand extroversion. Being scared says nothing about empathy. Manipulating people into panic where they fear for themselves or others and make decisions on that basis does not disprove empathy. Every single example is a red herring based on a false dichotomy.

Also, scale historically increases empathy. The more we have become a connected global society, the more empathy has increased for others around the world.

Don’t forget the anti-race mixing. They believe kids of mixed-race have no place in heaven, because there’s a different heaven for each race and mixed-blood people have no connection to the devine, so everyone better maintain racial purity.

They’re pretty similar to Scientology, right down to the child labour. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/13/nx-s1-5374934/shen-yun-lawsuit-dancers-child-labor

It’s not going to overthrow a government, but it’s also not just dance. They explicitly include a bunch of political messages. They’ve had whole songs and sections of shows dedicated to the idea if overthrowing China’s government and promoting a particular political worldview, not to mention the anti-atheism and anti-evolution stuff. It’s a bit like if Scientologists had more of a political movement to them and went around doing Broadway songs with anti-psychiatry, pro-Xenu, overthrow x government lyrics. Of course, they’re free to believe whatever they want, and I’m not calling for them to be cancelled, but they have also received state support for a long time because of alignment with US interests and the point is to influence public beliefs, so they basically are a propaganda dance troupe that’s part of a larger influence effort also working on other fronts.

Falun Gong is headquartered in the US. They are the cult behind Shen Yun. They’re also behind the Epoch Times. They have an explicitly anti-China political agenda aimed at the overthrow of China’s government that they work to promote through both. It’s also pretty notable that Friends of Falun Gong, which has given financial support to them over the years, is an organization conspicuously founded by one of the co-founders of the US’s National Endowment for Democracy, and they get diplomatic support from the US because of their political agendas. Not that they have gone without issue in the US either though, as in 2024 the CFO of Epoch Times, the news influence arm that complements Shen Yun’s cultural influence arm, was indicted by the DOJ for coordinating a large international money laundering scheme and pled guilty to it just recently.

So, they actually basically are a shady foreign influence group with a political agenda from outside Canada.

Canada’s small population to serve inference to is an advantage to some extent in such a capex heavy space, but the money being committed federally is pretty tiny. I look at $3.3 billion committed for AI over 5 years when compared with $60B for new subs, $3B for Arctic patrol ships, and up to $27B on F-35s if we go through with that order and don’t think we’re being serious about sovereign AI at all. We don’t have to be an OpenAI spending half a trillion on data centers for training and inference to reach a market of a billion+ people, but $3.3B over 5 years is not being serious about carving out our own independence from hyperscalers.

I’m waiting to see what comes as a final version of the national AI strategy, but what my feeling for a while is that what we’re seeing with AI in Canada is very reminiscent of what we’ve seen in O&G, but even more lopsided. Lots of US ownership, raw material (both mineral and data) coming from Canada but with value-added processes owned by US companies, revenue that will flow south, and lock-in to their systems.