AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio urges Canada to build $1B public supercomputer

Yoshua Bengio has been thinking for a while about what happens if the technology he helped pioneer becomes smarter than humans — and escapes our control.

"We could basically create new types of living entities that have their own preservation as a more important value than our own," he said.

Entities, he worries, that, with the aid of robots, could one day "roam the planet."

But Bengio, who is scientific director of Mila, the Montreal-based artificial intelligence institute he founded in 1993, is increasingly contemplating political solutions to head off such a sinister scenario.

At home in his spacious but unpretentious 1950s residence on the edge of Mount-Royal Park, the AI guru clearly feels time is of the essence, both when it comes to his own to-do list for 2024 and for governments to rein in increasingly powerful artificial intelligence systems.

"It's going to be regulation first," he says, "But eventually they will want to take back some control, maybe initially by building their own infrastructure."

That infrastructure includes building much more powerful computers, stacked with thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs), components that are ideal for training or testing AI large language models like ChatGPT.

He'd like to see that class of machine built in Canada, funded by governments, so public entities have the digital firepower to keep up with the private tech giants they'll be tasked with monitoring or regulating.

"I think government will need to understand at some point, hopefully as soon as possible, that it's important for [them] to have that muscle," said Bengio.

Bengio says such a supercomputing resource would cost about a billion dollars, and when he pitched the idea to governments in Canada the response so far has been, "'we are listening."

"It's a lot of money," he acknowledged.

Other governments around the world, though, are already spending a lot of money to build more powerful public computers for AI, notably in the United Kingdom, which last fall announced one called Isambard-AI that would be built at the University of Bristol as part of a £900M plan to "transform the U.K.'s computing capacity."

That computer would be 10 times faster than anything else now operating in the U.K., and about 20 times faster than the most powerful publicly accessible supercomputer in Canada, the Narval, housed at Montreal's École de technologie supérieure, according to the director of the organization that runs it, Calcul Québec's Suzanne Talon.

The non-profit, funded by Ottawa, the province and academia, is one of five National Host Sites, called clusters, for Canadian public supercomputers along with other installations at universities in Victoria, Vancouver, Waterloo and Toronto.