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Canada move forward with electric car investment in Oakville with Ford

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The federal minister for innovation and his staff had embarked on a letter-writing campaign, contacting every single EV manufacturer in the world with a personalized message, asking them to come to Canada and build their cars here.

No luck.

He rubbed elbows with them every chance he got, but executive after executive told him they weren’t ready for that kind of market, or else he had already missed his chance. All those production mandates had already been spoken for.

That was until Bains ran into Ford Canada’s president Dean Stoneley at the auto show in Toronto last winter and sensed an opening.

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Canada rushed in, with months of lobbying, union support, tales of fabulous workforces, plenty of cash and a splash of luck. And despite the pandemic and the sudden re-orientation of the auto sector towards manufacturing ventilators, it worked.

“I had a really good conversation with Dean and we really opened the door,” Bains recalled in an interview Friday.

The result is a high-risk foray into a market that Canada hopes to catch up to, reviving the auto manufacturing sector in southern Ontario and proving to skeptics that it is possible to cut emissions and make money at the same time.

 

It’s risky because the federal and provincial governments have now put $600 million on the table to persuade Ford to rejuvenate its Oakville plant with a $2 billion pledge to build batteries and electric vehicles there for more than a decade, entrenching government involvement in the troubled auto sector for the foreseeable future.

It’s risky because $600 million is 30 per cent of the total investment. That’s a lot higher than the traditional 20 per cent — and it could well be an invitation to the rest of the world’s global manufacturers to expect much higher subsidies than in Canada’s past.

And it’s risky because, in the process of luring Ford to build EVs in Canada, Ford had to nix an undertaking somewhere else in the world (Mexico) — something other countries don’t usually take kindly to. The federal government has signalled that it’s willing to engage in the ugly combat to win production mandates, even when it’s not necessarily a neighbourly thing to do.

“This project was heading for Mexico and we were able to turn it all around,” says Jerry Dias, national president of Unifor, the union representing the majority of Ford workers.

“All kinds of little things have gone our way.”

A turning point for both Dias and Bains came in June when they heard rumours that the Ford was going to wind down production of the Edge in Oakville. Such a move would spell the end of a significant Ford presence in Canada, a disaster for the industry that is a mainstay for Ontario’s economy.

Dias got to work on the phones and let it be known that if Ford moved to shut down Oakville, he would not hesitate to have his union strike the engine plant in Windsor, Ont., which supplies the F150 and the Mustang, among Ford’s top sellers.

Bains, who has a deep understanding of the company because he worked in finance there for three years before getting into politics, got on the phone with Jim Farley. At the time, Farley was chief operating officer and a key decision-maker in where the company would expand or shrink.

“I made the whole pitch to him. And I think it resonated,” Bains said.

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A few days later, as luck would have it, Farley was named chief executive officer.

Bains had to convince the rest of his cabinet colleagues that putting up a huge chunk of money for a non-pandemic industrial adventure would be well worth it.

He brought Stoneley and Dias together to make the pitch to his industrial strategy council. Bains turned to the Strategic Innovation Fund for funding. They all talked incessantly to Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s staff and cabinet. And the case was made.

 

By the time Unifor sat down with Stoneley to renegotiate the union contract and set the tone for a larger round of negotiations with other auto manufacturers in Ontario, almost all the pieces were in place.

The company and the union reached a deal to maintain employment, mass produce electric passenger vehicles in Canada for the first time, and make their batteries too.

It’s definitely a victory for Ford and more than 4,500 of its workers.

But before the federal and provincial governments can call it a success, they need to show that the huge investment in Oakville is just a starting point for setting up Canada as a competitive hub for burgeoning electric vehicle market.

That’s something Bains knows all too well.

“It’s one story in a chapter in a book called the new, smart industrial policy,” he says.

 

Source: – Toronto Star

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Amazon completes $4B Anthropic investment to advance generative AI – About Amazon

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Amazon concludes $4 billion investment in Anthropic.

Customers of all sizes and industries are using Claude on Amazon Bedrock to reimagine user experiences, reinvent their businesses, and accelerate their generative AI journeys.

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The work Amazon and Anthropic are doing together to bring the most advanced generative artificial intelligence (generative AI) technologies to customers worldwide is only beginning. As part of a strategic collaborative agreement, we and Anthropic announced that Anthropic is using Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its primary cloud provider for mission critical workloads, including safety research and future foundation model development. Anthropic will use AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips to build, train, and deploy its future models and has made a long-term commitment to provide AWS customers around the world with access to future generations of its foundation models on Amazon Bedrock, AWS’s fully managed service that provides secure, easy access to the industry’s widest choice of high-performing, fully managed foundation models (FMs), along with the most compelling set of features (including best-in-class retrieval augmented generation, guardrails, model evaluation, and AI-powered agents) that help customers build highly-capable, cost-effective, low latency generative AI applications.

Earlier this month, we announced access to the most powerful Anthropic AI models on Amazon Bedrock. The Claude 3 family of models demonstrate advanced intelligence, near-human levels of responsiveness, improved steerability and accuracy, and new vision capabilities. Industry benchmarks show that Claude 3 Opus, the most intelligent of the model family, has set a new standard, outperforming other models available today—including OpenAI’s GPT-4—in the areas of reasoning, math, and coding.

“We have a notable history with Anthropic, together helping organizations of all sizes around the world to deploy advanced generative artificial intelligence applications across their organizations,” said Dr. Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of Data and AI at AWS. “Anthropic’s visionary work with generative AI, most recently the introduction of its state-of-the art Claude 3 family of models, combined with Amazon’s best-in-class infrastructure like AWS Tranium and managed services like Amazon Bedrock further unlocks exciting opportunities for customers to quickly, securely, and responsibly innovate with generative AI. Generative AI is poised to be the most transformational technology of our time, and we believe our strategic collaboration with Anthropic will further improve our customers’ experiences, and look forward to what’s next.”

Global organizations of all sizes, across virtually every industry, are already using Amazon Bedrock to build their generative AI applications with Anthropic’s Claude AI. They include ADP, Amdocs, Bridgewater Associates, Broadridge, CelcomDigi, Clariant, Cloudera, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Degas Ltd., Delta Air Lines, Druva, Enverus, Genesys, Genomics England, GoDaddy, Happy Fox, Intuit, KT, LivTech, Lonely Planet, LexisNexis Legal & Professional, M1 Finance, Netsmart, Nexxiot, Parsyl, Perplexity AI, Pfizer, the PGA TOUR, Proto Hologram, Ricoh USA, Rocket Companies, and Siemens.

To further help speed the adoption of advanced generative AI technologies, AWS, Anthropic, and Accenture recently announced that they are coming together to help organizations—especially those in highly-regulated industries including healthcare, public sector, banking, and insurance—responsibly adopt and scale generative AI solutions. Through this collaboration, organizations will gain access to best-in-class models from Anthropic, a broad set of capabilities only available on Amazon Bedrock, and industry expertise from Accenture, Anthropic, and AWS to help them build and scale generative AI applications that are customized for their specific use cases.

Deepening our commitment to advancing generative AI, today we have an update on the announcement we made to invest up to $4 billion in Anthropic for a minority ownership position in the company. Last September, we made an initial investment of $1.25 billion. Today, we made our additional $2.75 billion investment, bringing our total investment in Anthropic to $4 billion. To learn more about the broader strategic collaboration between Amazon and Anthropic, of which this investment is one part, check out the stories below:

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Amazon doubles down on Anthropic, completing its planned $4B investment – TechCrunch

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Amazon invested a further $2.75 billion in growing AI power Anthropic on Wednesday, following through on the option it left open last September. The $1.25 billion it invested at the time must be producing results, or perhaps they’ve realized that there are no other horses available to back.

The September deal put $1.25 billion into the company in exchange for a minority stake, and certain tit-for-tat agreements like Anthropic continuing to use AWS for its extensive computation needs.

Amazon reportedly had until the end of the first quarter to decide whether to increase its investment to a maximum of $4 billion, and here we are just before the deadline, and the company has decided to throw in the maximum amount.

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Anthropic’s AI models are one of very few that compete at the highest levels of capability (however you define it) yet are available at scale for enterprises to deploy internally or in user-facing applications. OpenAI’s GPT series and Google’s Gemini are the others up there, but upstarts like Mistral may soon threaten that fragile triumvirate.

Lacking the capability to develop adequate models on their own for whatever reason, companies like Amazon and Microsoft have had to act vicariously through others, primarily OpenAI and Anthropic. The two have reaped immense benefits by allying with one or the other of these moneyed rivals, and as yet have not seen many downsides.

What we can take from Amazon’s decision to invest the maximum after (one must assume) getting a pretty close look at how they make the AI sausage over there is, really, pretty scant.

It makes too much strategic sense for these companies, which possess enormous war chests saved up for exactly this purpose (outspending rivals when they can’t out-innovate them), to pour cash into the AI sector. Right now the AI world is a bit like a roulette table, with OpenAI and Anthropic representing black and red. No one really knows where the ball will land, least of all the companies that couldn’t predict or create this technology themselves. But if your bitter enemy puts their chips down on red, it only makes sense for you to bet on black.

Especially if you can bet on black at a discount — which is what Amazon got here, since it could invest at Anthropic’s September valuation, which is most certainly lower than it is today.

That said, if things were looking sketchy over there — the way they must have looked at Inflection before Microsoft pounced on it — Amazon could have backed out or just invested less than the full supplemental $2.75 billion. But that might have sent a confusing signal no one wants getting out there, least of all existing multibillion-dollar investors.

We know Anthropic has a plan, and this year we’ll find out what Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and other multinational interests think they can do to monetize this supposedly revolutionary technology.

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Canada to tighten foreign investment rules for AI, other sectors

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Canada will require foreign companies to warn the government in advance before making investments or acquisitions in artificial intelligence, quantum computing and space technology, Bloomberg News reported on Tuesday, citing an interview with Innovation Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne.

The move will aid the government in conducting a national-security review before transactions get too far advanced and would-be investors may be restricted in their access to target companies’ user data or other property while the inquiry is taking place, the report said.


Click to play video: 'Canadians concerned about risk of AI generated fraud'
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Canadians concerned about risk of AI generated fraud

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The tougher rules will also apply to investments in critical minerals and potentially other sectors, Champagne said to Bloomberg.

Earlier this month, Champagne said Canada will crack down on foreign investment in the interactive digital media sector to stop state-sponsored actors from endangering national security.

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