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UTAM to reduce the carbon footprint of its long-term investments by at least 40 per cent by 2030 – News@UofT

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The University of Toronto Asset Management Corp. (UTAM), which manages over $10 billion in assets on behalf of the university, plans to reduce the carbon footprint of the endowment and pension investment portfolios by at least 40 per cent by 2030.

U of T’s arms-length investing body outlined the commitment in its 2019 Carbon Footprint Report, which analyzed the carbon footprint of public equity, private equity, private real estate and private infrastructure holdings within the university’s pension portfolio as of Sept. 30, 2018. The report uses the pension portfolio as a proxy for the endowment portfolio because the investments in each portfolio are substantially similar.

The planned 40 per cent reduction across the two portfolios would have three times the impact of simply eliminating all oil and gas companies, which UTAM estimates would reduce the carbon footprint of the portfolios by only about 13 per cent.

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“This is a target that is ambitious yet achievable,” said Daren Smith, president and chief investment officer at UTAM.

“Having a carbon reduction target is a highly effective way to address the risks and opportunities related to climate change in an investment portfolio.”

The 2019 Carbon Footprint Report calculates the pension’s carbon footprint in 2018 at 136.1 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per million dollars invested – a 2.2 per cent reduction from 2017, which was the first year a carbon footprint was calculated and will serve as the base year for the 40 per cent reduction target to 83.5 tonnes or less by the end of 2030.

Read the 2019 Carbon Footprint Report

Smith said UTAM management worked closely with its board and investment committee, along with university leaders and stakeholders, to determine a carbon footprint-reduction target that is both significant from a climate action perspective and is consistent with the university’s risk and return objectives for the pension and endowment portfolios.

While responsible investing has long been a component of UTAM’s investment process, the organization adopted formalized environmental, social and governance (ESG) protocols in 2016 in response to U of T President Meric Gertler’s 14-point plan to make U of T a leader in tackling climate change.

UTAM has since signed on to the United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI), signed the Montreal Carbon Pledge and released carbon footprint and responsible investing reports, among other initiatives.

“The University of Toronto recognizes that the coming decade will be crucial in the fight against climate change,” President Gertler said, noting the university pledged in its Low Carbon Action Plan to cut its own greenhouse gas emissions by 37 per cent from 1990 levels by 2030, putting it on a path to becoming a “net-zero” institution.

“We applaud UTAM for taking this latest giant stride in its ongoing efforts to address climate change and responsible investing while continuing to invest the university’s assets prudently,” President Gertler continued. “Although the 40 per cent reduction target for the pension portfolio is expected to be reviewed by the University Pension Plan (UPP) Trustees when the assets transfer to the new plan in 2021, we felt it was important to get started on this important initiative now instead of waiting any longer.”

UTAM doesn’t buy and sell individual securities itself, but hires external investment managers to invest assets on its behalf in what’s referred to as a “manager of managers” approach. To that end, Smith said that one of the strategies under consideration to achieving the 40 per cent reduction target will be to work with investment managers to create lower carbon footprint portfolios.

“We’ve been talking to our investment managers to understand how they factor in material environmental, social and governance considerations, and that includes climate considerations,” Smith said. “We score our managers on responsible investing as part of our investment due diligence.

“We rate the managers and encourage them to adopt best practices.”

Smith, who sits on the board of the Canadian Coalition for Good Governance, said the approach enables UTAM to play a key role in influencing the approaches and attitudes of investment managers going forward. That, in turn, allows U of T to have a sustainable, long-term impact that goes well beyond that of its own investment holdings.

Smith cited an example of one investment manager who, thanks in large part to encouragement from UTAM, has become an emerging leader in responsible investment in their space.

In addition to announcing its carbon footprint reduction target, UTAM, on behalf of U of T’s pension and endowment funds, endorsed the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) that was established by the Financial Stability Board, a Switzerland-based organization that promotes oversight and regulatory policies for the financial system.

Starting in 2020, UTAM will provide reporting following the TCFD framework, which includes recommendations for companies and organizations pertaining to disclosure of their climate-related financial risks. The endorsement makes U of T the first Canadian university to endorse the TCFD recommendations on behalf of its pension and endowment funds, joining the ranks of over 930 public and private sector organizations in supporting the initiative.

“We are taking a comprehensive approach to addressing climate change,” Smith said. “The carbon reduction target and our support for the TCFD recommendations are important aspects of this approach, but it also includes incorporating ESG factors into our investment decision-making process, active ownership through proxy voting and company engagement, and assuming an advocacy role with regards to policy-makers and regulators.”

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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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