The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday, Sept. 17, edition that the Canadian and German governments are contributing up to $300-million to a non-profit, LawZero, founded by Universite de Montreal professor Yoshua Bengio. The Globe's Joe Castaldo writes that the new financing will be used to hire more staff and pay for the computational processing costs associated with research to build a system called Scientist AI that the organization says will not have the negative traits found in today's models. Prof. Bengio says, "We urgently need to have a plan to build AI that is not going to do really bad, misaligned things." Each country will contribute up to $150-million in grant funding to LawZero. Prof. Bengio has played an outsized role in the development of modern AI alongside Canadians Geoffrey Hinton and Richard Sutton. But after the release of Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT in 2022, he became deeply concerned about the implications of the technology, which could be used for nefarious purposes such as cyberattacks and building biological weapons. More powerful systems could also outsmart humans, he argued, and current models are already displaying harmful traits such as deception, cheating and sycophancy.