NEWS
Canada partners with Cohere to advance Artificial Intelligence leadership
The Government of Canada has signed a memorandum of understanding( MoU) with Toronto-based Cohere to accelerate the deployment of Artificial Intelligence( AI) in public services and reinforce the country’ s global technology leadership.
The agreement was signed by Evan Solomon, Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation and Minister responsible for the Federal Economic Development Agency for Southern Ontario, and Joël Lightbound, Minister of Government Transformation, Public Works and Procurement.
Cohere, a Canadian developer of Large-Language Models, will work with the government to explore opportunities to integrate AI technologies across federal departments. The aim is to improve efficiency within the public service while supporting the growth of a made-in-Canada AI sector.
The partnership underlines Ottawa’ s commitment to foster innovation, support local talent and create jobs, while setting responsible AI standards on the global stage. Officials said the deal is also a step toward safeguarding digital sovereignty and ensuring Canada remains competitive in an AI-driven economy.
“ There’ s no better place to leverage the innovative technology of Artificial Intelligence than here in our own backyard, and no better use than in the service of Canadians,” said Solomon.
“ This MoU with Cohere is an opportunity to explore how sovereign AI can strengthen public services, protect our digital sovereignty and create opportunities for Canadians,” said Lightbound.
Aidan Gomez, Chief Executive Officer, Cohere, said the partnership will help secure Canada’ s role as a global AI leader while driving economic productivity and national security.
Singapore public sector to deploy Gemini on GDC air-gapped
Singapore public sector agencies, including CSIT, GovTech Singapore and HTX, will be the first in Asia and among the first worldwide to gain access to Gemini on GDC.
With this technology, they can accelerate the development and deployment of agentic AI while keeping highly sensitive data within their on-premises data centres fully disconnected from the public Internet. It opens up entirely new use cases for government agencies, helping them build AI agents with leading multimodal reasoning and‘ working memory’ capabilities to assist with national security, public safety, policy modeling and more. of the key solutions HTX is leveraging to address evolving challenges in the realm of public safety without compromising our strict data residency and compliance requirements. This will include fine-tuning Gemini models on GDC for Home Team-specific use cases.”
Loh Chee Kin, Deputy Chief Executive, Centre for Strategic Infocomm Technologies, said:“ As a key GDC collaboration partner in shaping the GDC air-gapped product roadmap and validating the deployment solutions, we’ re delighted that this pioneering role has helped us grow our cutting-edge capabilities and establish a proven deployment blueprint that will benefit other agencies with similar requirements. We’ re excited about the availability of Gemini on GDC, and we look forward to building on our partnership to develop and deploy agentic AI applications for our national security mission.”
Ang Chee Wee, Chief AI Officer, Home Team Science and Technology Agency, said:“ HTX is scaling our development of innovative AI solutions for the Home Team. GDC’ s secure, managed platform is one
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