It’s important for citizens to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Canadian and US economy before they decide that the country needs a ‘deal’. I’ve brought together a bunch of background info that I haven’t heard much of from the legacy media. I think it suggests Canada is doing a whole lot better than America right now. https://billhulet.substack.com/p/my-hot-take-on-the-current-trade
The uptake (successfully getting value put of llms) is probably the bigger opportunity than the models themselves at this point - as model performance gains plateau and converge, the possible margin per token may get close to nothing.
Canada punches above its weight on a research pov, but misses on capitalization. That said I think US market is going to take a massive hit from over investment. Related sometimes Canada’s caution is a good thing! (See financial crisis).
On the other hand… The opportunity for the frontier labs is less on research / capital in my opinion, but whether network effect becomes a material advantage.
I agree the value collapsing to a layer at which we can compete is probably our best hope of staying competitive, but counting on network effects is not something that leans in our favour. The US labs and the existing US tech platform giants already dominate on network effects. And, on research, we have traditionally punched above our weight but research itself is increasingly going to be dependent on frontier model access, which means we’re either looking to big Chinese models or big US models.
Even if the US market takes a big hit and we fare better due to prudence, I’m not sure what edge that ultimately gives us. We still wouldn’t be the ones who own the rails on which recovery and growth would be built, and just like we saw the US recover to dramatic growth faster after 2008, we would likely see the same again as capital keeps chasing the frontier and betting on big platforms that already own the infrastructure layers.