Al Vigier: Canada's AI strategy shouldn't include secret Palantir bills
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I also think any form of platform AI usage to be a national security threat in the absence of stringent controls over that data and the platform. At some point I think governments and companies will wake up to this and demand local LLMs or, in the very least, a cloud platform within their jurisdiction, ownership and control.
The 1980s and 1990s ushered in this idea of "small government", privatization and public-private partnerships that I think was a huge mistake with catastrophic consequences. It's simply letting the foxes into the hen house. It leads to regulatory capture, a revolving door and a massive government-to-private wealth transfer.
What's funny is that a lot of this stems from a now throughly debunked idea of the "tragedy of the commons" [1].
[1]: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/economic-intelligence/2015/03...
So so perhaps we should be excluding American companies at this time, but in the name of competition and openness, we should allow bids from our real allies, such as the Europeans or the Asians.
Oh and Premier Xi lives under your bed.
It's amazing how fast everyone forgot about Xinjiang. These things don't stop simply because journalists get bored.
Havent forgotten. Its not that China got better, its that its competitors got worse.
For example, it's okay to butcher 160 Iranian school girls because Iran just butchered 100,000 innocent protestors in a single day (trust me bro).
The kind of people running these companies don't have true allegiance to anything but their own objectives. If necessary, they'd move all operations to Europe or East Asia in a month, and you'd have "Palantir 2" under a different name with no better ethics or privacy.
Increased emphasis has to be on running things domestically with on-premises hardware. As long as the vendor is elsewhere and not subject to oversight, the risks remain.
Are they making any preparations for war, at all, that they weren't also doing in 2021?
Right up until Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia maintained that, no, that troop buildup wasn't meant as an invasion force, and a good chunk of the world believed Russia because it was a moronic idea to invade Ukraine. Trump is far more moronic and power drunk than Putin, and would perhaps not even organize troops befre invading Canada, all because somebody in the inner circle goaded Trump into it.
> in response to a comment about the US threatening to annex Canada
Work on your ability to determine what a sentence has in focus and what it doesn't.
You comment was ambiguous, using pronouns with multiple referents. I chose the referring that was the most charitable possible interpretation of your ambiguous comment. Your intended point is even more obviously wrong.
Are you thinking that the Candian public doesn't care about Trump's annexation threats?
https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/palantir-posted-a-manifest...
https://www.newsweek.com/us-draft-update-major-tech-company-...
France, Germany, Spain, and Britain have or are in the process of disassociating from them.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/16/france-ai-data...
https://www.dw.com/en/german-intelligence-offices-snub-us-ba...
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/andy-burnham-drop-spy-tec...
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/spain-tells-state-backed-fir...
Why would anyone in their right minds do business with a company like that?
Antichrist is only mentioned in the 1st and 2nd letters of John, where it refers to many antichrists (1 John 2:18), who are identifiable because they deny the Father and the Son (1 John 2:22), and that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (2 John 1:7). The term simply means, 'against Christ', so anyone who is against Christ could be labelled such, even if they didn't match the description in 1st and 2nd John.
So antichrists existed when these letters of John were written and an innumerable number of them have existed over the past 2,000 years and exist even today. While antichrists would likely continue to exist while the events in Revelation occur, they are not described as having any role in the events described in Revelation.
The reason people link antichrist to the beast or false prophet in Revelation is not due to the writings in the New Testament stating that there is a link. It is more that any being who is against Christ, including those in Revelation, are likely to deny the Father and the Son and deny that Jesus came in the flesh, so, it isn't difficult to find numerous antichrists throughout the past 2,000 years that Christians could identify as being an antichrist and since, for each generation, their time was, to them, the end of time, because the future hadn't happened yet, it was easy for them to think of these antichrists as potentially being the beast or false prophet of the end times described in Revelation.
Over time, this traditional link between antichrist and the beast or false prophet became very strong, in spite of not being stated in scripture and more tradition has grown up around linking antichrist with the beast or false prophet, creating traditions upon traditions, upon traditions, not of which is substantiated by scripture or any other early writings from the Christian community.
Government to tightly regulate and oversee itself, I perceive.
> Democratic nations have power over their government but not over corporations.
Democratic governments and corporations have been around about as many centuries, and both have long ago perfected techniques to make sure the people have no direct power over either of them, often in tandem. That said, it seems remarkable that you're less anxious about the partner in this age-old dance that has the warplanes and myriads of armed enforcers.
If you're idealogically opposed to Palantir, how will a home-grown Palantir help? It would likely do the same things Palantir does but with a Canadian Alex Karp
Neither are great, but one is worse.
I think the main thing is they all move to California or New York as soon as they can, because they can't achieve their sociopath ambitions as easily here.
Granted, America's been leading on encouraging the worse angels of our nature for the last, what, 70 years? But these personalities exist everywhere.
America tries that for valid reasons (unfair subsidies, human or labor rights violations, BYD): get called fascist or stupid
America tries that for stupid xenophobic reasons, gets called stupid or xenophobic.
This shouldn’t be surprising.
For example in some power utility companies, to install few auxiliary sensors to monitor xyz only in a pilot project is a 3 years work.. upgrading old 3G modems is done in stages over years just not to interrupt the operations, and all of these are terminal devices, not core or servers where a tiny mistake in that foundation migration will send the city into dark ages.
For the ones who haven't watched this amazing show, here is a small Google AI summary:
Samaritan is the primary antagonist of the later seasons of the sci-fi series Person of Interest. It is a fictional, totalitarian artificial superintelligence created by Arthur Claypool. Unlike its counterpart, the Machine, Samaritan has no moral constraints, viewing human free will as a flaw requiring aggressive control and mass surveillance
Any competent developer already immediately flees to the US to triple their take-home pay at first chance and Canadian employers are fully aware of this.
Lots do move to the US too, but it's a filter for ambition, not competence. Don't confuse the two.
The only way is Canada joining the EU in making their own tech, but even then, this will take at least a decade to materialize, if any, don’t forget all infrastructure hardware is still US, hp/dell/nvidia/etc plus decades of software and OSes, so yeah.
Peter Thiel abusing government backchannels.
> What's preventing a Canadian competitor from doing the same?
A lack of access to corrupt government backchannels.
Government procurement takes a lot of time to see through to completion; Palantir is not a new company, they're over 20 years old now. To succeed you also need money for lobbyists; regardless of what you feel of them they are a necessary part of the system. Also at the government level, especially at the level of federal governments, you are competing with Oracle, IBM, and other similarly large companies which is difficult to do if you are a new, small company.
You as canada have only two options:
1) use closed sourced systems
2) use chinese models, with their own risks
3) hardware, i think it's clear.
Cohere is not even in the list of top competitors .