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Canada's output stalls as exports and business investment drop – BNNBloomberg.ca

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Canada’s economy slid to a near halt in the fourth quarter, as exports dropped by the most since 2017 and business investment declined, but December came in stronger-than-expected, suggesting the economy had a bit of momentum going into 2020 before the coronavirus concerns.

Gross domestic product grew at an annualized pace of 0.3 per cent — essentially a stall — in the three months ended December, in line with economist and Bank of Canada estimates, the federal statistics agency reported Friday. That was down from a revised 1.1 per cent pace in the previous quarter, making it the second-straight quarterly deceleration and slowest pace of growth since 2016.

The period ended on a higher note than most analysts anticipated with a monthly expansion of 0.3 per cent in December, the fastest pace of growth since May. This brings the annual growth rate of Canada’s real GDP to 1.6 per cent for 2019, down from two per cent in 2018, and lower than the U.S., which posted a 2.3 per cent increase in real GDP, the agency said.

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The Canadian dollar was down 0.4 per cent to $1.3438 against its U.S. counterpart at 8:37 a.m. Toronto time. Bets that the Bank of Canada will cut interest rates at the March 4 meeting rose to more than 50 per cent, from 36 per cent on Thursday.

Key Insights

-The slowdown in the fourth quarter was largely expected as a series of temporary factors including a week-long rail strike, manufacturing plant disruptions and pipeline shutdowns stunted growth. The quarter started off weak with most of the temporary factors occurring during the first two months of the period. And while December recouped some of the losses, this still doesn’t change the picture that Canada’s economy remains in a fragile position and the Bank of Canada could cut rates, especially in light of the recent impacts from the coronavirus and domestic rail disruptions

-The saving grace for the economy was household spending, — a reflection of a strong labor market — up two per cent annualized on the quarter. But Canadians are largely buying non-durable goods and services — which suggests they may be wary of big ticket items. Another indicator of caution is that the household savings rate rose to three per cent in the fourth quarter

-Businesses had a tough quarter, perhaps reflecting the heightened global trade tensions at the end of the year. The drop in exports was the biggest downward contributor to 4Q output, falling 5.1 per cent annualized, the biggest drop since 2017. Business investment contracted three per cent in the fourth quarter after an 8.4 per cent expansion in the prior quarter. Investment in machinery and equipment fell 13.5 

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-Supply chain disruptions drove business inventories higher in 4Q, contributing 0.6% to the annualized growth rate. This suggests that if businesses had chosen not to increase inventories, the economy would have contracted. This could potentially drag on 2020 growth if firms decide to meet demand by drawing down stockpiles.

-Residential investment decelerated to an annualized pace of 1.1 per cent in the fourth quarter from 13 per cent in the prior quarter. Non-residential investment shrunk by an annualized 6.3 per cent, more than offsetting the pickup in capital spending in the third quarter

-Overall, domestic demand — which excludes the trade sector and inventories — remained sluggish, growing at just 0.7 per cent on an annualized basis

-The housing market softened in the 4Q as investment in new construction decelerated

-Third quarter GDP was revised down to an annualized 1.1 per cent, from an initial estimate of 1.3 per cent

–With assistance from Erik Hertzberg.

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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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