Trudeau Unveils $1.8 Billion Package for Canada's AI Sector

Sounds like a waste of money.

- This industry is already thriving without throwing two billion of government funding at it.

That's 3 times what is being put into a federal housing program and AI already has people falling all over themselves to invest.

This week, we announced a $15 billion top-up to the Apartment Construction Loan Program, a new $6 billion Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund, a new $1.5 billion Canada Rental Protection Fund, and a $400 million top-up to the Housing Accelerator Fund.
https://www.pm.gc.ca/en/news/news-releases/2024/04/05/changing-how-we-buildhomescanada
- Missed those. My bad. What led me to my error?
  (Searching for announcement...)
  Here it is.
  Ok, I see where I went wrong. That was about low interest loans for those looking to improve the actual building process to reduce costs and accelerate construction.
  Mea culpa.
  E: and thanks for the correction.

What a cock. There are a thousand things more important than subsidizing "AI" horse shit. It's making money all on its own.

Well, no, AI's not actually making money. It's drawing in speculators, though, so the hucksters hyping it are doing well for themselves.
AI is another VC white elephant. It's very expensive to run, with questionable reliability and a totally umclear future.
- We're making plenty of money, thank you very much - it also is a VC white elephant, you're not wrong, but that VC firehose is currently pointed at AI and we've got plenty to fund salaries.
- "Making money" in the same way that every tech fad makes money. There will be legit applications but it wont be the world shaking boom that the news makes it out to be.

I forgot how much of an echo chamber Lemmy is.

All the posts are rephrasing (1) why not more housing investments (2) AI is already doing well enough, why give American companies more money.

Zero discussions of the nuances of investing, the timing of the investment, HOW it should have been spent. Instead, it's all "WE SHOULD BE INVESTING IN HOUSING".

This is only a fraction of what they announced this week in housing funds, which is 7.9B in funding and 15B in loan:

This week, we announced a $15 billion top-up to the Apartment Construction Loan Program, a new $6 billion Canada Housing Infrastructure Fund, a new $1.5 billion Canada Rental Protection Fund, and a $400 million top-up to the Housing Accelerator Fund.

The problem with housing isn't solely how much is invested at the federal level, but really the laws (at all 3 levels) that need to be completely rewritten from scratch for the 21st century. What's the point of giving more money to provinces if it ends up subsidizing luxury real estate developers selling to rich foreigners? Does a 20M invested in building Drake's Toronto downtown vacation house end up helping most Canadians?

What we really need is aggressive development of not just housing, but high-quality-low-margin housing, and all the infrastructure (water/electricity/hospital/schools) and public transport that goes with it.

We shouldn't take 20 years to decide if we should buy a new train line - we should build now and think later. In fact, we should be giving contracts to Canadian companies (something that Europe/Japan/Korea/China tend to do), or at least force PSP/CDPQ to gain a majority stake in Alstom (sorry Macron) so they can consistently offer the cheapest price. Hell, go ahead and nationalize CN while at it, take over the freight rails and force cargos to wait. What are they gonna do, take the congested roads?

We shouldn't be talking about millions, but billions, when it comes to housing. If we want 4M houses, which might cost something around 300K per unit and 100K of other infra upgrade costs, that'd take 1.6 trillions. The 20B allocated is literally a bandaid to cover a gunshot wound, and their 2B investment in AI would not change anything at the even the research level (considering 200M over 5 years to maybe 10 schools, that's 40M a year which is less than 4% of the budget of a research university in Canada).

What we need is a 500B fund, half coming from federal/provincial/municipal (the latter who are collecting all those taxes and should be reinvesting a lot more on education and utilities), the other half from industry, spent over 10 years, with a clear, unpoliticizable, efficient, and unstoppable plan (apart from environmental and indigenous issues, nothing should stand in the way).

So really, people here are getting angry that "AI" is getting the crumbs of the pie instead of "housing", not one is thinking about who's eating the rest of the pie (private sectors owned by Americans like Bill Gates who's the major shareholder of CN).

Your comment is the same thing I've been hearing for YEARS, and we've yet to see any improvements. At some point I'm going to call bullshit.
There's always some excuse why the government can't just help people directly, and it always boils down to some long way version of trickle down. We're sick of it. We need help NOW, FUCKING RIGHT NOW. we don't care about the excuses and we no longer wanna be told we have to wait another few years for the "investment" to somehow get to us
- I totally agree the money should be distributed now. But spending $500 billions doesn't happen instantaneously, even if it gets allocated now and the first cheque is written tonight, you can't just throw 2B per day and housing will magically appear. It should have happened 10 years ago, second best is today, but we got a measly 20B today instead of 100+ that would actually make sense.

Wait… AI has its own sector now?

It's the "out of work crypto-bros with piles of GPUs" sector.

That sector is already printing money with financiers falling over themselves together a piece.

If there's any chance at all that even a fraction of the jobs threatened by AI are lost to AI then as Canadians are put out of work, private American companies will consume the money that would otherwise be going to Canadian labourers.
Our options are to compete and/or to legislate, but legislating away a technology like AI could very well be a huge economic disadvantage.
If there's any chance that AI will be as disruptive as it looks in the near future, this type of investment is crucial to retain some Canadian control over the Canadian economy, and could very well be a national security risk to do otherwise.
Yes the government needs to do way more for myriad other problems, but this is an important area to focus on as well.
- Interesting point. I took the headline as investing in AI rather that investing in AI being in Canada. Cheers.
So no point trying to attract it to Canada, then?

So he's got money to house homeless people, right?

Provincial issue
- Humanity issue.
- Conservatives can't think further than Trudeau bad.
Why does nobody ever recognize the people who refuse help? The biggest issue in my city are the homeless who go around threatening people, yelling at strangers, attacking pedestrians and refusing help or a spot at the shelter. We have services to help them, but no resources if they refuse.
- I do get that part of it too, however it's a much lower percentage here that are unwilling to receive support. I myself have come across these types on two occasions, out of thousands of homeless people I've interacted with.

Free money, everyone run to grab a piece of the free money pile. I mean - free if you ignore the cost to the tax payer.

- Fuck off, I'm in no way a Libretarian - this sector of our economy doesn't need investment there are buckets of VC money available (I should know, I work in it). I'd much rather see this money going to supplement housing affordability especially by way of public transit. We could build a whole lot of infrastructure for this money.
- tAxAtiOn iS thEft
  It 100% is theft when those taxes go into the pockets of tech-bros instead of healthcare or education.

Liberals in pre-election mode: billion here, billion there, before you know it, it starts to add up to real money.