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Latest COVID-19 research investment supports knowledge exchange on social, cultural and economic impact of COVID-19 – Canada NewsWire

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Research funding will help equip public, private and not-for-profit organizations to respond to challenges posed by pandemic

OTTAWA, ON, Sept. 21, 2020 /CNW/ – As Canada continues to manage the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, supporting the work of Canadian researchers is key to building a healthy, more resilient and prosperous country. Working together with government, industry and not-for-profit organizations, researchers from across the social sciences and humanities can help provide data, insight and evidence to guide our actions in the months to come while we navigate postpandemic economic and social recovery.

Today, the Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, announced an investment of over $4 million in funding through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council‘s (SSHRC) Partnership Engage Grants, to support 172 projects and almost 600 researchers working with businesses and community partners from across Canada. These grants provide short-term and timely support for partnered research activities that will inform decision-making in the public, private or not-for-profit sector.

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In response to the early phases of the pandemic crisis, the latest Partnership Engage Grants competition included a special call to address COVID-19 related research. Over $3 million of the investment announced today will directly support 139 projects addressing this call. Some of these projects funded will study changes in the teaching profession, the pandemic’s impact on small- and medium-sized enterprises, mental health among entrepreneurs, and impacts on seniors and their community support services.

Quotes

“The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has posed unprecedented challenges around the world. While much of the focus to date has been on developing and testing effective countermeasures to control the spread of the virus, the work these researchers will be doing to examine the longer-term impacts of the pandemic on individuals, businesses and communities will better position Canada for a strong recovery.” 
—The Honourable Navdeep Bains, Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry

“SSHRC’s investment in these diverse partnered research projects will advance critical knowledge needed to address the impacts of COVID-19 and the social, cultural and economic challenges facing citizens, communities and businesses in Canada and around the world.”
Ted Hewitt, President, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council

Quick facts

  • SSHRC’s Partnership Engage Grants provide short-term and timely support for partnered research activities that will inform decision making at a partner organization from the public, private or not-for-profit sector.
  • The Partnership Engage Grants COVID-19 Special Initiative provides researchers and their partners a unique opportunity to foster knowledge exchange on COVID-19 crisis-related issues, challenges and impacts. It offers a unique opportunity to exchange knowledge between postsecondary researchers and different sectors of society, including graduate students, postdoctoral researchers and other highly qualified personnel.
  • The Partnership Engage Grants COVID-19 Special Initiative call is ongoing. Recipients of the September-deadline applications will be announced soon.
  • The application intake for this first ever COVID-19 Special Initiative competition exceeded expectations. To ensure an appropriate response to this demand, SSHRC reallocated just over $3 million more to this initiative. This additional funding brings the total amount for the June and upcoming September competitions to almost $5 million.

Associated links

Follow SSHRC on social media: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook

Follow @CDNScience on social media: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook

SOURCE Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada

For further information: John Power, Press Secretary, Office of the Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry, 343-550-1456, [email protected]; Media Relations, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, 343-291-1777, [email protected]; Media Relations, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, 343-549-6141, [email protected]

Related Links

http://www.sshrc-crsh.gc.ca/

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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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