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Artificial intelligence (AI) company Cohere has committed to at least 1,000 new technical jobs as part of Ottawa’s up to $1.6 billion investment, a deal one Trent professor has cautioned students to treat with skepticism.
“There are lots of jobs in the AI sector that are not good jobs,” said Anne Pasek, an associate professor at Trent University and Canada Research Chair. She advised students to be “on guard, curious, assessing” about “what kinds of jobs are on offer.”
Prime Minister Mark Carney announced the investment on Oct. 29 in Montreal. In a news release, the government said the Toronto-founded AI company will create at least 1,000 new “high-paying Canadian technical jobs” by 2030, committing at least $1.7 billion to computing infrastructure in Canada, maintaining its Canadian incorporation and headquarters and to “create opportunities for students and recent graduates.”
“We are not waiting for the future of AI to be decided somewhere else by those we don’t know or those we don’t trust. We are building it right here, the right way,” Carney said at the announcement.
The news release says the investment will be made “in stages, with regular reporting on progress against the company’s commitments, including jobs and investment in Canada.”
Patrick Allen, who handles Cohere’s Canadian communications, declined OTR’s request for an interview, instead pointing to a blog post Cohere published on Oct. 30. It says the company plans to open more than 1,500 Canada-based roles by 2031, including about 1,000 highly skilled technical positions and more than 250 paid student roles by 2029.
The post says the investments span “multiple provinces” but doesn’t name them. It also doesn’t specify whether the student roles are co-ops or contracts, how long they last or whether they are entry-level.
Pasek said she expects that roles will probably not be permanent jobs. She compared them with federal youth employment programs, which she said are usually intended as summer work and rarely last more than a year.
Pasek said Cohere, unlike some AI developers, does much of its model-training work with people in Canada rather than contracting it overseas, and some of that work is “quite psychologically draining.” She said former Cohere workers she has spoken with described a “very robust” mental health support program, but that people can’t do the work for long.
The CDEV, the federal Crown corporation providing financial, legal and commercial advice on this deal, said in a Nov. 11 emailed statement to OTR that it will hold the investment, vote the shares and monitor Cohere’s commitments “with a view to protecting Canada’s commercial interests.”
“Specific terms of the relationship with Cohere, including those in respect of governance and investor rights, remain confidential as negotiations of final arrangements are ongoing,” the statement read. It described Canada as “an important strategic investor and existing customer of Cohere.”
The government has also framed the investment as building “sovereign” AI for Canada. A federal project statement on an earlier $240 million grant says Cohere will be an anchor tenant at a compute facility in Cambridge, Ont. built and operated by CoreWeave, a company that lists an address in Livingston, N.J., on its website. The statement says the project will support “reducing reliance on foreign infrastructure.”
Pasek said a good definition of sovereignty is one that lets a society “choose its own path forward” and that “it’s not clear to me that you can have a private company meet that goal.”
She said who operates the facility matters. “The bulk of the costs of building this data centre are going to go to the chips (Graphics Processing Units) within it,” she said, which means Cambridge won’t get a high-value property to tax.
An equitable stake, Pasek said, gets the government “a seat at the figurative table,” but not a say in the “day-to-day decisions of the company.”
“You don’t get to have a larger social debate about ‘Is this a technology that we as a Canadian society think is valuable and want to support, and if yes, to what end and what domains and what areas?’ That becomes a question answered solely through market imperative,” said Pasek. “Like, what will this company do to maximize its value? Not what will it do to maximize the benefits of Canadians.”