0:20All right, let's roll. Let's roll.
0:22A large language models is the topic of the hour here. So, uh thank you so much. My name is Mark Mondesir. Uh I as it was mentioned, I'm the managing director for Equinix Canada. Uh data center company, probably the largest uh uh tech company that you've likely never heard of. Uh but, we'll save that for another day.
0:43So, again, large language models um GDP contributor to the tune of what, $7 trillion is I think a statistic that I uh I read a little while ago. Uh $7 trillion GDP opportunity by 2030 2031.
1:00Productivity contributor innovation contributor, yes. Um but, I think we're all sort of sitting here wondering how, right? How do we uh how do we drive trust and adoption? How do we mitigate risk? And so, this is the conversation that we want to have with uh all of you over the course of the next 28 minutes. I am joined by two esteemed colleagues. Joelle Pineau, who is the chief AI officer at Cohere, Canada's baby.
1:27And uh Annelise Tezeno, who is the VP of government affairs at Qualcomm. And so, please give our speakers a hand here.
1:37[applause] So, Joelle, I was thinking that maybe we could start with you. You could provide a few opening remarks, and uh we can jump into the discussion.
1:48Sure. Great to be here. Thank you for coming to Montreal, my hometown. It's always great when we can pull in such a great a group of people together to have some of these conversations.
2:00What's fascinating? I started, you know, in in AI a couple decades ago, and and already we were talking about building dialogue systems and language models and so on with the technology we had early 2000s. And so it's incredible to see the progress that has happened uh in those in those couple of decades.
2:19We spent a lot of that time essentially like de-risking the technology. No one had heard about AI, the word LLM didn't exist. We barely talked about neural networks, and there was a number of years that were required for that technology to incubate and mature. And a lot of the work did happen here here in Montreal, in Toronto as well. Um luminary researchers, um incredibly talented people, um many of whom then moved abroad to commercialize that technology.
2:49Um we're now at what I'll call maybe phase two, which is, you know, we now understand from a technical point of view what this technology can do. We need to figure out how do we grow and scale that technology. And so that's where a lot of the interesting conversations about the infrastructure need to happen, the policy side of it.
3:10We need to come together across government, business, researchers, and figure out how we will actually scale this technology such that we really fulfill the potential. You talked about the incredible economic potential. Where my mind goes to is that economic motor is a way for us to have a vision for society. And we also need to tackle that question.
3:32And soon that phase will come where we need to get our heads together and figure out what is the project of a society that we want to build. What is the economy that can take roots in the technology as well as in the infrastructure that we've laid.
3:48It's great. It's great. Thank you for kicking us off, Yoshua. That's awesome. and you know, grow, scale, and monetize from what you've from what you've shared. And Elise, would love to hear from you.
3:59Thank you. Um, happy to be here. Um, spent two, three days, amazing days talking to some of you. Um, so, as you said, I'm a bit of a transplant. Uh, I'm not Canadian. I thought maybe like one. Um, I'm from France. Uh, I work for this amazing tech company, Qualcomm, for almost over 20 years. And uh, we're not an ADVI company, but we do power uh, AI model. Uh, we do power a
4:27lot of different applications. We were born in the the age of mobile. Um, that was the first um, [snorts] technology revolution that we went through.
4:37Um, mobile's the internet, as you remember that. Uh, and now we've entered uh, this new, very um, disruptive uh, technology revolution. Um, there is this great uh, Pulitzer Prize that talk about the age of ice. And um, Thomas Friedman, I'll I'll owe you. The age the age of ice which was a printing press, not bounded, heavy, not mobile, to the age of digital technology that brought us to, you know, information flowing
5:07through pipes. Um, you still can turn the faucet on and off. And then here we are in the age of vapor.
5:14AI seeps into everything. Uh, doesn't have any border, doesn't have any boundaries. Um, but does have some sovereign aspect, I'm sure we'll talk about it. So, anyways, um, to Joel's point, I think now we're at a point where we have to show like where the real results are going. How it benefits society. What is the economic impact? Um, how do we bring this to the next level of adoption across consumer, enterprise, but at at a very large
5:44scale. Um, there's a lot of competition around the world. We come from a very global global company Um, and we see what's happening and how people are adopting this. So I hope I'll be able to share some of those insights.
5:56Awesome. Awesome Annelies. You know, you brought up the S word.
6:00[laughter] The sovereignty word.
6:03It's interesting, you know, somebody made a comment to me a little bit earlier today. They said, I was asking them about, you know, what is your take on data centers and sovereignty and critical infrastructure and the way it was worded to me was you know, it seems as though a lot of our education on this topic is coming from the media. And the media has, you know, it's tendencies of morphing words sometimes.
6:24So it's like you know, there's some that might say that sovereignty is about you know, building things in Canada. Others might say that sovereignty is about ensuring that whoever is operating whatever we build in Canada is is Canadian. Others talk about like data residency. And so I just wonder how you talk, you know, tackle this topic internally and how you speak to it to your clients and maybe we can start with you Annelies.
6:49Yes, of course. As I mentioned, we're a global company. So we've we've visualized experienced different approaches to sovereignty and our key approach to sovereignty for us is like I say, there's no border but we have trusted partner.
7:04[snorts] And so that's how we approach sovereignty. Whether our trusted partner is company like Cohesity, it's a it's a government, it's like we understand what's the need of the partner, the customer. And what's the cultural because sometimes there are cultural aspects of the particular region of the world, whether it's Asia, whether it's Europe. There are uniqueness to it. Uniqueness doesn't mean that we have to develop solution for you know, one particular region or another.
7:33But we have different partner and so stacks need to be what they call, you know, the AI stack technology stack have different flavor depending on different country. I think the the government sometimes there's a little bit of misunderstanding like we want to build those champion and that's fair and they should. Um, but then where do you build the parameters?
7:54Like do you By doing that, you could raise the risk or the cost or the performance.
8:02Cuz all of those three things matters.
8:04If you choose a solution that is bounded to a partner country, you lose the scale, the cost become prohibitive. Um, and in other in other case, geography actually matter. Like I've heard this not long ago with what's going on on the Eastern block of Europe. Do you want data center on the front line?
8:26So I think some of those country would prefer much prefer have data center somewhere else. Um, so anyways, I'll I'll stop here, but those three aspect of risk, Yeah.
8:36cost and performance matter for the competitiveness of a country or a region.
8:42Yeah, and I love the comment that you made also around partnerships, trusted partners. Joelle, I wonder if there's anything you'd like to elaborate on this topic.
8:49It It's something we talk a lot about internally at at Cohere. Maybe, you know, just to set a little bit of context, Cohere, Canadian AI company found 2019, headquartered in Toronto. The three co-founders um came out of the University of Toronto ecosystem, out of that research ecosystem, really had that insight about the transformer architecture being the building brick on which we could then scale intelligence.
9:14Um, at the time it was a quite audacious choice to to decide to be headquartered and grow from from Toronto rather than than going off to the to the Bay Area as do many many young incredibly talented entrepreneurs. Um, but sovereignty wasn't really in the cards. You know, they had a strong motivation to do that and the ecosystem supported them in doing that.
9:38Um, but they didn't really think in those terms. In the last year, it has become part of almost every conversation. And where we really converge in in thinking about the the the value proposition for sovereignty, it's about control. Really, it's about the ability to control what is this technology? How do you use it? What is your access to that technology? Um, I do think being a company that's anchored in
10:06Canada has given us a different point of view on how to build the technology. And so, to give you an example, very early on, um, we invested a lot in building multilingual models. Models that operate over 50 plus languages, making these models open source, building a global community. That has opened up tremendous commercial opportunities in Korea, in Japan, in Europe, where having models that operate well in the local language matter. This year, we've seen a lot of interest to move from multilingual to
10:36multicultural. So, yes, it's understanding your language, but it's also understanding your references, your literature, your cultural context, your politicians. And now we're moving into the context of the society. And so, you know, filing your taxes in Canada isn't the same as filing your taxes in Germany. We need a system that is able to converse across different ways of functioning as a society. So, I would say, first pillar of that sovereignty approach is really developing technology
11:06that serves your need and as a citizen, as a government, and as a company, being able to choose what is that source of the technology. The other, um, part of the conversation that is very top of mind for many people, um, in particular global enterprises, is, um, the access to the technology.
11:29Today, there are four countries in the world that have the ability to train foundation models. There's the US, there's China, there's Canada, and there's France, and that's it.
11:40Um and many companies, even if they're headquartered in one of these countries, actually don't want just one provider. I talked to Canadian entrepreneurs and I encourage them to have more than one source of technology, not limit themselves to only one. I was in France earlier this year talked to French um decision-makers, businessmen, and they don't want to rely solely on Mistral.
12:01They welcome having a Cohere into the market to provide optionality in terms of that technology. And the third pillar, and I'm sorry I'm going a little bit long, but this has been such a topic this year. The third topic. It's the topic.
12:14Third um the third dimension is really the question of security.
12:19This year uh security and in particular the geopolitical situation has been top of mind in many many conversations that we have. Um and understanding and having control over your data, knowing that the solutions are deployed in a way that is secure, that is private, that keeps your data where it needs to be and doesn't allow your system to be vulnerable to attacks, but also doesn't allow your
12:47data to get out of the system is really important. So, we do a lot of on-premise deployment, completely air-gapped in regulated domains, and that's a huge factor um in in a lot of the conversations.
13:00I love this, so I So, I've heard a few things, right? Cuz I think we should probably simmer on this. So, sovereignty is absolutely about control. I love the way that, you know, our ministers have been putting it. They're so quotable. Um uh sovereignty is not about solitude, right? It's about what is built in Canada remain under Canadian control.
13:19Uh but Anna Lee, you made the point that it also there's also an aspect of of uh of partnerships, right? Trusted partnerships. And I think what's at the core of that is networks, right? What we like to say uh at uh at Equinix is, you know, that sovereignty is ultimately about networks, and if you control your networks, you control your data.
13:39And so, I wonder if you have any thoughts to add to that, Annelies?
13:42Yeah, and I want to kind of resonate to what I said earlier about the multilingual um as I said earlier, uh being a transplant uh in this region, I understand the value of of multilingual, multicultural. Uh and we see that. And so, at the heart of our companies and allowing this flexibility of having more than one model, uh optimizing the model to consumer usage.
14:07Um you mentioned a air gap on-prem facility. Yeah, that's another model that very few talk about. Um so, you know, the [laughter] the area is kind of stuck in into sometime a little one one big data center generic LLM model leads to, you know, chat and do some great things.
14:26But from a citizen standpoint, from a government's and what I hear that all the time, what does it give back to my citizen? What's the value added? Europe is thinking of building the data center as we speak right now.
14:39My question is like, for what? Like, what is it that you want to build that will give progress, confidence in your citizen? So, for what we do at Qualcomm, and I mentioned trusted and partnership, you mentioned security, uh we're here to enable all those things. It's like, uh we have the security protocol. We are enabling not only data center, but also, as you know, mobile phone. Um but then, what about, you know, XR glasses?
15:05Wouldn't you want have your LLM be remain local on your glasses as opposed to going back to the cloud? So, innovating with model builder, we don't build a model to optimize those multi-model into different ca- use cases, whether it's consumer, uh it's your car, Same thing in a car. Do you really want the car to ping back to the cloud? And there will be case you will need that for sure. But what we saying is like distribute the compute, distribute the
15:34energy, allow choices, allow protocol that will provide inter- interoperability between different jurisdiction, between different partner that have very different business model. So that's sort of our approach to openness to trusted partnership in different region.
15:52And now that is I don't want to put words in your mouth, but what I'm also what I'm what I'm hearing that you're implying is that um whether it be the topic of sovereignty or innovation or any of these pieces that it's use case specific, right? It's anchored to the problem that you're looking to solve or the opportunity that you're looking to reap from and not the other way around. Not technology for the sake of it, but again, I don't want to put words in your mouth.
16:18You you will need both.
16:19Um maybe where our special cases is is definitely on the use cases. As you know, we you know, we've had partnership with large car OEM, car automaker, sorry, auto- automobile maker that drive cars around in order to build your next generation of autonomous driving stack. That's an AI use cases that's is very valuable. And so yes, you will need data center. You will need all of this. What I'm saying is for certain region, you mentioned there's only four region that can build those
16:50potentially 5 gigawatt. I don't know what the latest number is. 5 gigawatt data center, you won't have that in Singapore. You will not even have that probably in Germany. Unless you know, again, there is maybe a compute shortage, although I would call there's going to be a huge energy gap. Infrastructure gap come 2030. It's not just the chips that goes in there. It's what powers those chips.
17:15Yeah. so for us having this aspect of distributing the energy, leveraging all those we shipped so far 4.3 billion AI-enabled chip. Why don't we leverage those in a different way? Why don't we And we're already seeing discussion about changing a little bit the architecture on how do distribution. This is already happening.
17:36Uh and I think that's where cooperation is great, uh innovation is great. Um sometime I know you you've heard that, but necessity is the mother of innovation. And this is very much where we're born in mobile. So we had to optimize that for mobile. How do we bring this innovation to the service of other data center and other use cases? So I'll conquer on that.
18:00So I want to stay on the sovereignty topic maybe a little while longer, but I want to pivot a little bit if you don't mind, uh ladies, is um right? So sovereignty is not just a matter of like data sovereignty or energy sovereignty that you just touched on or geopolitics. I think we can agree that there's something to be said about cultural sovereignty and talent sovereignty.
18:24And so when I'm speaking to cultural sovereignty, what I'm touching on is the way that large language models are trained.
18:30As we all know, right? The data that you use to train the model largely dictates its outputs. And so models that are trained on non-Canadian data run the risk of not um producing um outputs that are, you know, that uphold Canadian ideals, etc. And then there's the topic of talent, right? Developing a talent pool. So go in any direction that you'd like to, but Joy, maybe we can start with you.
18:55Yeah, I I mean, Canada had we forget, but you know, last week the the the Canadian government I must have I released the AI strategy. It's not the first of our AI strategy. We actually had one a number of years ago um that led to the foundation of three research institutes. Mila here in Montreal, Montreal Institute for for AI, Vector in Toronto, Amii in Edmonton. Um and so there was already this eye to making sure that we have sovereignty from a
19:24talent point of view and investing in this the creation of the CIFAR CIFAR AI chairs which drew amazingly talented researchers, university professors. We have over 1,000 people at Mila now. It's an amazing community that um makes the bridge from research to the rest of society as well as um industry, governments, and so on. Um so I I I feel we we have been ahead of of the world uh
19:52on this on this topic of of talent sovereignty. We we benefit from many people from around the world deciding to come invest here. Um but we also, you know, grow talent which then then moves around the world and and contributes elsewhere. So I think that's been incredibly successful. I'm glad to see the new strategy reinforces that. Sometimes there's a tendency to say, "Okay, we've done this like been there done that. Now let's do something else."
20:16No, you know, the government understood we needed to really continue investing in this and do do more. So um I I I think that's been intentional and incredibly successful. When it comes to questions of um culture and language in particular, Yeah.
20:34it's very interesting to see the trajectory that this has taken. And so, you know, here has invested, as I mentioned earlier, in building multilingual systems, um building partnerships partnerships with communities around the world in order to make sure that we are developing the right evaluation benchmarks in different languages. Um we've just announced a a week ago or so a partnership with Mila for the evaluation of our models in Quebec Quebecois French, which has a
21:04particular [laughter] some specificities to it. Um it's great to have a partner who will do the evaluation. You know, you don't want to be taking the exams and like marking it as well. This this is a very um, competent partner who's going to be running the evaluations. We've announced a partnership with the Quebec government earlier this week and that means they have the the ability to see whether the models are going to be uh, useful for their needs uh, in the language that
21:31serves most of their citizens.
21:34Uh, the challenge though is and I go back to your question of data. There's a bit of a tendency to say, "Oh, does you know, work well in this in this particular language. We're going to like bring in ton of data and like build a specialized model, right?" To have these, you know, sort of offshoot models that are that are more specialist and what we've observed over the last few years is the models the the core LLMs keep getting better and better and in fact as they get better at reasoning tasks, at math, they also get better at
22:03French whether it's from France or Quebec and so on. That generality really carries over to other domains. So, that's why in our partnership with Mila we're starting with a question of evaluation. Rather than jumping straight into training a new model for French in Quebec, let's actually see how well our models do today and then adding data is one option but there's several other ways to to improve the performance of the model. I do think the piece that's often overlooked in developing models is how much investment should be
22:32put into creating good evaluations and anyone who's been out there building software for the last few decades knows how much investing in quality assurance, testing, validation pays off by a strong multiple. And so, we need to do the same thing with our AI systems and not just the model but the system itself.
22:51Excellent. Excellent. And Annie, do you want to bring us home on this sovereignty topic?
22:55Yeah, and again I want to bounce back on two things, the talent piece and the data piece. So, So I'll start with the talent piece. Um, so as mentioned we're we're global. So for us and we we spend about I mentioned to you earlier 20 over 20% of our turnover every year into R&D.
23:12So with that said, talent is probably one of the number one priority for the company. So we always we have a massive university relation department that works globally.
23:22Um, from yes, from China to Canada to France to Germany. So for us research for talent we're very pleased about Canadian government again announced strategy position because for AI yes, talent should be your number one priority. Where are we going to how we how we forming? How we educating? We want to play a role in again building all those building blocks for the next generation of AI. So hiring
23:51grad post grad talent is is very good. Doesn't matter really where. At the end of the day the talent is a key issue. Of course there are jurisdiction that have different aspect and skill set. Definitely Canada is one on AI. Um, but but that's that's the talent piece for for us and for many of the government. So happy that direction the Canadian government is going.
24:18The the piece on data is actually very important. We're we're seeing we talk about compute wall. We talk about energy infrastructure wall. There's going to be probably be a data wall at some point.
24:27So where is going to be the next generation of data? If you don't train talent, but if you don't also deploy model in the field. Uh, real world data and that's where we see next. We we we start talk start not stop, but we've been talking for a long time about industrial AI, physical AI, the robotics that's going to happen. The cars that are driving on our street that are recognizing things around. So this is the next for us the next generation of
24:55real day world data that will make the model the next frontier. We We participated it. We will not build those model uh clearly, but that's where we want to accompany the ecosystem strategic partner because we have access like I said billion and billion of AI chip that enable out there. Uh it's there to leverage and innovate around it.
25:16And And if I can bounce back, I love this point because it to some degree, you know, our LLMs have learned what they can from the web. Like that's just where we are. Our LLMs not learn what they can from the physical world. And unlocking that source of data is going to be one of the key ingredients to get us to the next the next level in terms of intelligence, real intelligence that is embedded in a physical world.
25:40Yeah, and there's some great innovation in this space, too. We happen to be introduced recently to an organization born out of Montreal uh that is um tackling the synthetic data space right now for the fiscal AI world. So, Yeah.
25:52Super fascinating. We've got a few minutes left. Um I was thinking that we could pivot a little bit from uh the consumption topics and talk a little bit about Canada as the producers of this technology. I think it's very apropos given who we have on the panel here. And so, um on this topic of the AI value chain, so I think about it in this way. You've got the infrastructure layer, you've got the data layer, you've got the models layer, and you've got the application layer.
26:19At the infrastructure layer, a lot of speculation. I would argue that monetization in that space right now is among the chip makers. Um the data layer, things are transforming in terms of how you monetize data. The model layer is somewhat unproven. There's a bit of a beta VHS moment happening here. It's very likely that monetization goes to applications.
26:43But I'd love to get your thoughts on this. How should Canadians, Canadian businesses, Canadian governments be thinking about the AI a chain and the monetization of this moment and we'll probably wrap there.
26:56It's interesting because there's so much attention and and investment that goes to the models, but to some degree that is getting commoditized. You know, and and China has played a role in in that.
27:07Um there's um there's the application layer. I see a lot of um open space there um in terms of actually what does that look like to build, you know, to really understand the use cases, to build that. The The problem is that's not something that's easy to encode for AI right now. So, that actually takes like a lot of elbow grease, like people going in to understand the use cases, to define the evaluations to then feed into the system.
27:37So, we're seeing a lot of growth in the application layer, but also in the service side. And the layer that is often overlooked is the governance layer. We talked about regulation and so on and so forth and our governments have their work cut out for them and it's going to be an important part of the conversation to deploy this technology safely.
27:58But even for us, Coheere is a company who's completely focused on enterprise deployments, we don't actually do any consumer deployment. We're completely on the enterprise space. We've invested a lot in the last year in building a governance layer that gives full visibility to decision makers and those who are deploying that technology.
28:15So, the observability of how the AI agents are used, what do they do, the controlability from the point of view of like giving the right access to information to the AI agents that matches who is accountable for the behavior of the agents and all of the [snorts] auditability of these systems, the log traces and all of that. Um it's not very sexy, but that's the difference between having like completely rogue agents or having technology that is dependable uh for the
28:42enterprise and for governments. Um so, I do I do I do think, you know, whether you fold that into to the application or not, but that's where a lot of the important work is happening right now, especially as we move towards multiplicity of agents, orchestration between many different agents.
29:01Love it. Look, not sexy, but essential, right? Critical. And at least bring us home. Last word, please.
29:07Well, I know one country that found it sexy. That's China.
29:11[laughter] Uh they're all about diffusion. I mean, if you think about back in the days the internet has diffused and they created those massive companies and that's happening already on the application with AI. They have their they've built their LLM, they're happy. But it's really where okay, let's get this in the hand of consumer. We saw it with uh first hand with the drone, the robots, the cars. There's so much innovation out there. So, there is an opportunity and I and looking from a
29:40not a regulation, but policy incentive for ecosystem to be built around those application. And I think there's much more agreement about the different nations, call it G7 or whatever, or you know, the western world into where this should be going. Um there is I look at Canada, I look at Europe. There is massive amount of in- infrastructure, manufacturing, advanced manufacturing, energy, uh automotive, steel, all of
30:10those energy intensive, uh but also innovative, um where innovation can seep through it and improve the productivity, the operational safety. Uh we have a partnership as an example with Saudi Arabia on our with Aramco. To your point, it's completely air gapped.
30:28They're using their sovereign model, they're optimizing their productivity, the safety of the agent, detecting, you know, fault uh ahead of time, being able to Those are We see a lot of innovation and a lot of the ecosystem development, including in Canada in other place of the world. So, um I think I'll leave it there.
30:48Look, I feel like I could speak to you two all day, right? I have so many more questions for you, but we are at time. So, with that, I will simply say, Annelise, Joel, thank you.