Low-quality AI slop is flooding the internet. But contrary to many of his peers in the literary world, Hugo and Nebula award-winning speculative fiction author Ken Liu does not find the idea of it “all that scary.” The news: Speaking at Creative Destruction Lab’s Super Session Wednesday morning during Toronto Tech Week, the American software…
If Canada wants to compete with the US, it might need to follow the Americans’ playbook. That’s according to Council of Canadian Innovators Chair Jim Balsillie, who spoke about the importance of reorienting Canada’s regulatory environment to facilitate greater sovereignty during BetaKit’s Most Ambitious: Town Hall on Monday. “Wealth, power, and security are rooted in…
Cohere co-founder Nick Frosst says Canada needs to build more nuclear power plants to encourage sovereign tech development. And he believes growing that capacity could get Canada to “100 percent” renewable energy. The news: The call to action came during a panel at Toronto Tech Week’s Homecoming event themed around sovereignty, moderated by Build Canada…
As Canada gears up to spend heavily on defence, some domestic defence tech entrepreneurs have become frustrated with how the country is talking and thinking about so-called “dual-use” technologies. The term dual-use, which refers to products with both civilian and military applications, has come to dominate recent conversations about defence tech in Canada. At the…
Canada’s venture market had an AI premium in 2025, and new data from Canadian law firm Osler puts numbers behind just how large that premium became. According to the law firm’s latest Deal Points Report, AI companies captured 54 cents of every dollar invested last year, which is more than double their share the year…
Speaking at BetaKit’s Most Ambitious: Town Hall on Monday, Dominion Dynamics founder and CEO Eliot Pence said that in an era of modern warfare, Canada can no longer afford sluggish defence procurement. “We’re in a moment in time in which we want to privilege Canadian companies, and we have not done that for a long…
As the era of self-driving vehicles looms, Uber president and COO Andrew Macdonald says he doesn’t know what the company’s 10.5 million drivers and couriers will be doing in the near future. The news: Macdonald made the remark during a discussion with Satish Kanwar (of BetaKit majority owner Good Future) as part of Toronto Tech…
Building a $1-billion company with one person is now possible, but Tobi Lütke has no idea why anyone would do it. The news: To kick off Toronto Tech Week’s Homecoming event on Wednesday, the Shopify CEO took the stage with Rostra founder and Shopify board member Lulu Cheng Meservey, in front of a packed crowd…
This Q&A appears in the 2026 BetaKit Most Ambitious issue. Read more stories of the Canadian tech innovators strengthening our autonomy, security, and prosperity here. Canada is one of the few countries that produces more food than it consumes. We’ve turned that surplus toward the global market; Canada consistently ranks among the top 10 countries…
This article appears in the 2026 BetaKit Most Ambitious issue. Read more stories of the Canadian tech innovators strengthening our autonomy, security, and prosperity here. If you take Alberta’s Highway 2 south from Edmonton toward Calgary, the landscape is pure prairie. The highway bisects fields that unfold endlessly toward a horizon that most evenings is…
