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'Should we invest our 2020 TFSA now, or wait a few months?' – The Globe and Mail

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Here’s how I handle my TFSA contributions – I divide the total amount for the year, currently $6,000, by 26 and then have that amount electronically transferred when I get paid every two weeks into a TFSA investment account.

A reader recently asked about TFSA contribution strategies for this year: “We have yet to invest in our TFSA for 2020. Should we go ahead and invest now, or should we wait for another few months when the economy will hopefully begin to pick up again?”

I have no idea at the best of times about when the best time to invest is. Now, I’m more baffled than ever. The economy has been damaged and prospects for a comprehensive reopening seem uncertain at best, given the differing medical outlooks across the provinces. Will companies bring back all the workers they laid off? How many businesses won’t reopen? How much will economic activity be down overall six to 12 months from now? What about all the debt deferrals people arranged – what happens when they have to resume their usual payments?

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Our world today is so much different than it was in early February, before pandemic fears hammered the stock markets. And yet, the U.S. stock market has charged back to the point where it was off only about 10 per cent in late May from its 52-week high and well above its level of May 2019.

I don’t get it, and I won’t fight it. My biweekly TFSA contributions continue, just as they did when the markets plunged in March.

As to that reader question, I can only suggest the gradual approach to TFSA investing. Academic studies have shown that lump-sum investments outperform the gradual approach, known as dollar-cost averaging. But this year is off the charts – why guess what’s going to happen?

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Rob’s personal finance reading list…

Never refrigerate bread

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Tips from Consumer Reports on how to extend food expiration dates. Cut waste, and visit the supermarket less. By the way, coffee shouldn’t go in the fridge, either. Flour should, though.

Inflation: How big a problem will it be?

A lot of readers have told me lately they worry about inflation being ignited by all the money the government is pumping into the economy to offset the effects of the pandemic. This guide to inflation, deflation and disinflation should set minds at ease, at least until the good times resume.

How to avoid retirement myopia

Way too much retirement advice is tossed out in a general way, even if the needs and priorities of each generation are different. Here’s a different take – retirement guidance for people 25 to 40, 41 to 55 and 56+.

Make your own Starbucks drinks at home

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A personal finance blog shares some cheap and cheerful versions of tea, lemonade and coffee drinks.

Ask Rob

Q: Why you haven’t recommended five-year GICs as a possible safe vehicle for a portion of retiree funds? I have $50,000 in one earning 3.25 per cent, a higher rate than one- or two-year GICs or a savings account. It’s true I purchased when GIC rates were higher, but the principle remains the same.

A: I have written a lot over the years about how GICs make a good substitute for bonds or bond funds in diversified portfolio – they’re not as liquid as bonds in that there are stiff fees if you sell early, but they don’t jump around in price like bonds can. GIC rates are also quite competitive with bonds. The best rate on a five-year guaranteed investment certificate in late May was 2.3 to 2.4 per cent, while the yield on the five-year Government of Canada bond was just 0.4 per cent.

Do you have a question for me? Send it my way. Sorry I can’t answer every one personally. Questions and answers are edited for length and clarity.

Today’s financial tool

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How to report wrongdoing by an investment adviser.

Tweet of the week

Evan Siddall, president and CEO of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., takes on those who insist real estate prices can keep going up despite the economic damage caused by the pandemic.

In case you missed these Globe and Mail personal finance-related stories

More Carrick and money coverage For more money stories, follow me on Instagram and Twitter, and join the discussion on my Facebook page. Millennial readers, join our Gen Y Money Facebook group. Send us an e-mail to let us know what you think of my newsletter. Want to subscribe? Click here to sign up.

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Investment

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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