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Opinion: Gov't policies paying off in energy investment – Edmonton Journal

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Steel pipe to be used in the oil pipeline construction of the Canadian government’s Trans Mountain Expansion Project lies at a stockpile site in Kamloops, British Columbia, Canada. File photo.


Dennis Owen / REUTERS/Dennis Owen

Policy matters — and that fact is reflected in the 2020 Capital Investment Forecast from the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP). The 2020 forecast expects a $2-billion increase in capital spending in Canada’s upstream oil and natural gas sector compared to last year.

Total capital investment this year is forecast at $37 billion, up from an estimated $35 billion in 2019, for an overall increase of six per cent.

This is big news for the oil and natural gas sector, which has experienced significant challenges and a dramatic decline in investment over the last half decade. Back in 2014, capital investment in Canada’s upstream industry reached $81 billion.

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An inventory of what’s driving the positive investment forecast reveals key policies in producing provinces have helped to create a more competitive economic environment. A competitive platform attracts optimism and, in turn, attracts business, investment and creates jobs.

For example, the additional $2 billion in capital spending expected in 2020 creates or sustains about 11,800 direct and indirect jobs across Canada.

Nearly 70 per cent of those jobs (about 8,100) will be in Alberta, with the remainder across the rest of the country where Canadians make their living in the oil and natural gas industry.

Tax reform has played a key role in Alberta’s ability to attract long-term focused investment. In 2019, the Government of Alberta introduced the job creation tax cut. As of Jan. 1, 2020, Alberta’s corporate tax rate dropped to 10 per cent, as part of a plan to reduce the corporate income tax from 12 per cent in 2019 down to eight per cent in 2022.

The province also enabled producers to ship more crude by rail under curtailment and allowed new conventional oil drilling without the restriction on production. Again, a move to open the door to positive investment, new drilling, and job creation.

Notably, Saskatchewan recently released its Vision 2030 goal to increase oil production by 25 per cent to 600,000 barrels per day. The province continues to improve its efficient and effective regulatory environment. Capital investment in that province is expected to increase 10 per cent in 2020, going up to $4.4 billion from about $4 billion in 2019.

Investment in British Columbia is also expected to go up this year, to $3.6 billion from about $3.4 billion last year. That province is on the cusp of a global opportunity to provide liquefied natural gas for growing demand around the world.

For that to happen, pipelines are essential to move Canadian oil and natural gas within Canada and for export, and there is cautious optimism that capacity is in fact on the horizon.

Part of the optimism is due to the federal government’s continued commitment to the Trans Mountain expansion project, and its affirmation that this project is in the best interest of Canadians. In addition, the Federal Court of Appeal very recently cleared the way for the Trans Mountain expansion project to proceed. Enbridge’s Line 3 is scheduled to come on stream in late 2020, and pre-construction activities are ongoing for Keystone XL. The ability to get pipeline projects built is essential.

Canada’s oil and natural gas sector contributes to the economy in more ways than people may realize. The oil and natural gas industry accounts for 44 per cent of environmental protection spending, according to data from Statistics Canada; $3.7 billion in 2016. In addition, in the three years from 2016 to 2018, the industry contributed an average of $8 billion annually to government revenues through royalties and tax payments across the country.

The forecast $2-billion increase in investment is just a glimmer of the potential of Canada’s oil and natural gas industry. With record global demand for oil and natural gas, there is opportunity to significantly increase investment in Canada’s energy sector. Global energy demand is growing and Canada should be the supplier of choice.

Tim McMillan is president and CEO of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers.

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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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