Kim Adolphe is Founder and CEO of SWIFT Learning.Cohere is the federal government’s AI partner of choice and widely regarded as one of Canada’s leading artificial intelligence companies. At first glance, with more than 400 employees and a valuation of $6.8 billion, the company appears perfectly positioned to help Canada keep pace in the global AI race and assert technological sovereignty from the United States.At a conference in June, Gomez emphasized the importance for Canadian entrepreneurs to resist the gravitational pull of the US and avoid being absorbed by American firms. That’s easy advice to give when, in 2024, Cohere received $240 million in federal support for its $725 million data centre in Cambridge, Ontario..BARCLAY: A decade of Liberal governments imploded public safety in Canada.One would expect that staying in Canada, supporting local founders, creating domestic tech jobs, and reinforcing national sovereignty were embedded in the terms of that deal.In fact, this investment is part of the $2 billion Canadian Sovereign AI Compute Strategy, designed to strengthen Canada’s homegrown AI capacity and infrastructure. But the recent faux pas involving Stellantis where $105 million and roughly 3,000 anticipated jobs vanished after production of the Jeep Compass shifted from Brampton to Illinois demonstrates how quickly public investment can go awry. One can only hope that this hard, highly public lesson led to stronger, mandatory requirements this time around..Over the summer, they signed agreements with the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom to advance AI adoption in the public sector. They also announced a partnership with Bell Canada that will make Cohere’s AI infrastructure available to Bell customers, with Bell serving as its “preferred Canadian AI infrastructure provider.”Launched in 2019, Cohere was built by homegrown talent: co-founder and CEO Aiden Gomez. Gomez completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto, interned at Google Brain under AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and Lukasz Kaiser, and co-authored the influential paper that helped lay the groundwork for modern LLMs. So, by all accounts, Cohere reads like a great Canadian success story..BERNARDO: The great Canadian gun grab: Another billion-dollar bonfire of stupidity.Unfortunately, when you look under the hood, the real picture emerges: Cohere is already dependent on American technology partners. Reportedly, it plans to use federal funding to partner with a US AI infrastructure provider, CoreWeave, a favourite among major US players, including OpenAI and Microsoft, to build its new data centre. Once again, Canadian taxpayers may be inadvertently financing the expansion of US dominance in AI infrastructure.Geoff Gordon, CEO of Calgary-based AI cloud platform Denvr Dataworks, told The Logic earlier this year that he was “profoundly disappointed” that federal funding would “flow to a US company,” calling it “ridiculous.” I couldn’t agree more. It defies logic and follows the same familiar pattern of ignoring the lessons from past failures like Stellantis..Adding fuel to the fire, it was galling to hear Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst suggest he hoped Canadian companies would “someday” offer equivalent infrastructure.That’s simply not true, and even worse, Canadian firms were never given a chance to compete. The government contract didn’t require Cohere to evaluate qualified Canadian suppliers who could have met their needs..PINDER: Is Canada a country?.Setting that aside, there is an even more troubling issue: Cohere’s technology may itself have been built using questionable practices. This year, fourteen publishers, including the Toronto Star, Condé Nast, and Forbes — sued Cohere for allegedly using their content without permission to train its AI models. (Microsoft and OpenAI are facing similar lawsuits). The publishers also claim that Cohere’s systems produced hallucinated articles falsely attributed to them. Cohere’s communications director, Josh Gartner, dismissed the lawsuit as “misguided and frivolous,” and the company sought to have the case thrown out. A US court rejected that motion last Thursday.Either scenario should concern Canadians. Fast-tracking an AI ecosystem through the Cohere partnership risks undermining the very data sovereignty the government claims to defend. A trial could erode confidence in the federal government’s preferred AI partner; dismissing it simply raises new questions about how AI companies, especially those our government is so eager to partner with, will be held to account. With no national AI regulations yet in place to protect Canadians’ data, this gap highlights exactly the kind of work we specialize in at SWIFT Learning.Kim Adolphe is Founder and CEO of SWIFT Learning.
