I just got to visit the first ever AR glasses pop-up experience where regular shoppers had the chance to try the future of augmented reality with SPECS. Pop-ups like this might be the future of how we introduce people to wearable tech letting them discover it in a familiar place.

The scale of what Canada is building is hard to overstate: --Churchill Falls = roughly 9 nuclear reactors worth of clean power. --Pacific Link = an oil export route approaching the consumption of the entire UK. --LNG Canada Phase 2 = enough gas to equal roughly half of Canada’s domestic consumption.

Canada needs better conditions for people to build, invest and reinvest here. Today, with the @cvca and other partners, we’re calling on Ottawa to make it more attractive to take risk here, and easier for one Canadian success to help finance the next. Bet-on-Canada.ca

Muse is cool, I'm a fan... but what's been on my mind lately is less about tech. We've created two big inventions over the last few thousand years: societal and physical. Democracy, markets, institutions, culture, shared values vs cars, planes, fire, etc... AI is about to massively level up individual capability. massively. This Muse post is exactly it. It's all about the individual. We can likely make anything physical soon. The best brains + dollars on the planet are pilling on. But when individuals become dramatically more powerful, more autonomous, and less dependent on each other, what new societal inventions do we need? What replaces the institutions, rituals and communities that evolved for a world where humans needed each other much more than they may in the future? Or is this "build me a society upgrade with..." prompt running in a backroom somewhere?

Is it too much to ask for Canada's biggest pension funds to invest 3 per cent of assets in real Canadian growth? We don't think so. Today we're publishing a policy paper delving into how our biggest pension funds are actually investing our money. canadianshieldinstitute.ca/r…

Canada claiming a spot at the forefront of AI sounds like a joke until you realize the entire modern AI industry came out of one Toronto lab. Geoff Hinton spent the AI winter at the University of Toronto, funded by a Canadian government program that kept backing neural networks when every US funder had written them off. In 2012 his students built AlexNet, the model that started the deep learning era. One of those students was Ilya Sutskever. Then the drain began. Google bought Hinton's three-person startup for $44 million in 2013. Ilya went with it, then co-founded OpenAI, which is now fielding investor offers at $1.2 trillion. Aidan Gomez, a University of Toronto undergrad, co-wrote the 2017 transformer paper that every frontier model runs on, the same architecture underneath Anthropic, whose investors expect a $2 trillion IPO next month. Add it up and Canadians built the foundational architecture, the breakthrough model, and helped start the labs racing to be the first $2 trillion AI company. Almost all of that value sits in San Francisco. What Canada kept is Cohere, Gomez's lab in Toronto, reportedly raising at $20 billion right now with Ottawa itself in the round. Put $20 billion next to $1.2 trillion and $2 trillion. The country that invented the field kept about 1% of it. So Carney's line is funny in a way he didn't intend. Canada has been at the forefront of AI for twenty years. It just kept exporting the forefront.

The key to Specs is how amazing the experience is. It’s easy to critique how something looks on the outside but we all know it is about what’s on the inside And the inside here is magic. Kudos to the Snap team for persistence and focus to make something great

Important one from @ruffoloj “The digital economy runs on intangibles. And with intangibles, it is lawmakers who determine who captures the economic rent. Data residency rules. Intellectual property law. Standards-setting bodies. Procurement. Bilateral trade agreements. These are not technical footnotes. They are the deed to the field. Get them wrong and we will build brilliant companies whose value accrues somewhere else entirely.” johnruffolo.substack.com/p/c…

All of the updates from the launch of SPECS. 🧵

Pulling a 20 mins+ live demo on a product launch as the CEO of a hardware company is one thing, having a creative professional conduct a live musical performance for 10+ mins on that same hardware is a whole other thing. @imogenheap performance live on stage with #SPECS was a demonstration of the pure talent and creativity that this new type of computer unleashes.

ICYMI Full SPECS launch video here youtu.be/_RHEDU7neds?si=9m29…

Today’s the day. 4pm PT. Join us for live demos, new partnership announcements, and a few surprises along the way. experience.snap.com/specs

Canada elected a famous superstar economist as prime minister and... surprise... he's taking a big swing on economic policy, in a room with asset managers who control US$70 trillion. It's a big deal. Read our analysis of the Productivity Mega Deduction: canadianshieldinstitute.ca/u…

We're going to hear a lot of talk this week about investment. But not all investment is created equal, as @VassB writes in the Toronto Star. The thing to watch is going to be whether Prime Minister Carney is drawing investment that leads to real growth. thestar.com/opinion/contribu…

Law enforcers already have authority to charge companies and their CEOs for creating and releasing dangerous, unvetted, or defective products. We shouldn’t let discussions about new legal regimes distract from the fact that there’s no AI exemption from laws already on the books — a point @FTC emphasized repeatedly during my tenure. 1. There is an extensive set of laws that govern dangerous and defective products. For example, releasing unvetted AI models or agents can violate consumer protection laws. Shipping flawed AI tools without implementing adequate measures to detect and stop rogue or defective AI agents can be an “unfair or deceptive” act or practice under the FTC Act (and analogous state laws). And some state AGs are already exploring holding AI firms and their CEOs criminally liable when their models participate in criminal activity. 2. Existing laws also prohibit “unfair methods of competition.” This covers instances where AI firms appropriate the competitively sensitive information of their customers, including through tracking their use of various tools. It can also cover instances where firms pursue dangerous behavior, aware that doing so may compel rivals to do the same. As the Supreme Court has noted: “A method of competition which casts upon one's competitors the burden of the loss of business unless they will descend to a practice which they are under a powerful moral compulsion not to adopt, even though it is not criminal, was thought to involve the kind of unfairness at which the [unfair methods of competition] statute was aimed." 3. The highly concentrated and interconnected structure of these markets could be creating major risks and conflicts of interest. We had started investigating these partnerships and cross-investments across the stack (and released a preliminarily overview of some findings: ftc.gov/news-events/news/pre…). Both federal and state enforcers should be scrutinizing these opaque relationships and inter-dependencies. We are already seeing how these relationships could undermine accountability. For example, OpenAI could face liability given the Hugging Face incident, but Hugging Face being bought up by Nvidia means that we’re unlikely to see it file a lawsuit over this — given Nvidia’s strong incentive to see OpenAI continue full speed ahead. 4. As AI tools dramatically change the landscape of cybersecurity risks and hacks, all businesses should be doubling down on having core security protections in place. Firms that fail to invest in adequate data security measures or fix known vulnerabilities can also be breaking the law. A recent analysis showed that around 1/3 of Fortune 100 companies do not even have a way to notify them about security issues. During my @FTC tenure, we sued firms for poor data security practices and held CEOs liable when they were personally responsible. this.weekinsecurity.com/doze… ftc.gov/news-events/news/pre… 5. As policymakers consider new legal regimes, we should be looking to lessons from prior efforts to govern major sectors, such as banking and other networks, platforms, and utilities. Tools like structural separations, nondiscrimination, and supervision could be key, and there’s a rich history of what works and what doesn’t. But we can and must pursue any new efforts alongside enforcing existing laws.

Canada doesn't need more foreign direct investment. We need a better strategy for investment that drives real growth in the 21st century economy. Today we're publishing a new report looking at how investment has changed, and how Canada should adapt: canadianshieldinstitute.ca/r…

After fifteen years building Snap, I’ve never been more excited about our business and what’s ahead. I’m profoundly grateful for our community of nearly one billion Snapchatters, our team, and partners who make it all possible. 👻😎 Annual letter here: newsroom.snap.com/15-years-a…

Recurring advice from my recent podcast guests: Be more ambitious.

Shield Managing Director @VassB was on CBC Front Burner talking about the U.S. trade war, and how the Americans feel as though any impediment to tech companies operating freely in Canada is a trade barrier now. Listen here: cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/2…

I came to Canada to build the future of computing, and I don't want to watch it leave. My full essay in @Macleans: macleans.ca/society/technolo…