A former Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii) founder, who has since gone on to start an “ethical AI” company, has released a privacy-first model intended to keep all data in the hands of the user. “I’m unhappy with the way that AI is going these days, and I wanted to do something about it.” Jonathan…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM There’s something strange about where the clean energy transition has gotten stuck. Generating power from the sun and wind? Mostly figured out. Storing it? That’s the part nobody has fully solved. When the sun sets and the wind drops, whatever energy existed an hour ago is gone. A grid…
BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM You know the feeling: you walk toward the hall closet with good intentions, reach for the handle, and stop. The coats are in there, somewhere. So are the shoes that were trendy two seasons ago, a bag you haven’t opened in months, and something that might be an umbrella….
This week we’re speaking with friend of the pod, award-winning Canadian science-fiction author, journalist, and tech activist Cory Doctorow, who is back with a new book, “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life after AI.” What the hell is a reverse centaur? I’m not going to spoil that for you, but I will say Doctorow is…
Canadian AI scaleup Cohere is joining the chorus of tech companies calling for AI models to be more transparent. The news: In his very first post on X last week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang shared an open letter in support of releasing open-weight AI models to build a more competitive and accessible AI economy in…
Vancouver-based agentic travel referral platform TravelAI has purchased the brand name of Canadian-founded alternative lodging platform Sonder out of bankruptcy. The news: TravelAI announced on Monday that it now owns Sonder’s intellectual property, including more than 50 global trademark registrations and over 70 domain names, through a court-approved bankruptcy sale. Sonder’s operating business, properties, leases,…
An industry group is asking the federal government to create a seventh pillar in the national AI strategy to support Canada’s semiconductor industry. The news: Canada’s Semiconductor Council (CSC), which represents almost 60 Canadian semiconductor companies, has submitted a position paper to the federal government titled Sovereign AI Needs Sovereign Silicon. The position paper broadly…
Amazon, a company better known for delivering everything from toilet paper to high-end furniture to your doorstep than fighting forest fires, is opening a disaster relief facility just outside of Edmonton. The centre will operate out of the e-commerce giant’s YEG1 fulfilment centre south of Edmonton. The hub, which is part of a growing fleet…
Québec City-based Tenor, which is developing a blockchain-based lending platform for asset managers and businesses, has raised $2.5 million USD ($3.5 million CAD) in seed funding. The news: Variant led the round, with support from fellow digital asset-focused investors like Nascent and existing backers Prelude, Coinbase Ventures, Lattice, Very Early, and undisclosed angels. This financing…
AI-native Canadian startups are outperforming the global average for annual revenue growth, according to a report from American cloud computing giant Amazon Web Services (AWS). The study found that Canadian firms are expanding their sales by an average of 165 percent year-over-year, eclipsing the 156-percent mark reported globally among this group and the 65-percent rate…
