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I love being Canadian - "Not Available in Canada Due To Regulatory Uncertainty"

>>dissid+(OP)
Translation is that the government engaged in a shakedown of Google, on behalf of Bell and Rogers: Bill c-18. It was disgusting and corrupt and I’m glad that Google and Facebook pushed back.

This has recently been resolved though, with a compromised deal, so hopefully these services will soon be available here

>>tomCom+Yq
Except they just came to an agreement https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-bill-c18-on...

>>dissid+(OP)
Same here. Nothing AI related from Google is available in Canada. This sucks.

To add insult to injury, they have nice press releases and demos of their latest AI but aren't easily accessible or available until next year. The press and Wallstreet love gob it up and the stock rises. Is it just for them?

>>tomCom+Yq
Unfortunately Google caved and are giving away 100 million dollars. I wish they had a spine like Meta. I generally despise both companies (Meta more than Google) but the enemy of my enemy can be my friend at arm's length.

>>martin+NF
Anthropic doesn't allow Canadians access to their AI services either. I haven't had the chance to check out if I can get access to Claude via Amazon Bedrock - but that might be an option. My company is already on AWS and currently they are thinking of dipping their toes into using AI for our software next year, so I might get to play around with it yet. It'll probably either be OpenAI integration directly, or going with something that's available as a hosted service on AWS.

OpenAI services are available in Canada but as an individual, $27/mo for ChatGPT Plus and then paying per use for the API is kinda a hard sell for me.

I'm needing a hardware refresh soon, so I think i'm just going to run the open source stuff locally once I get around to figuring out how to set that all up.

>>dissid+DO
The amount and terms agreed upon are what Google originally offerred, so I've mostly seen it reported as the gov't caving.

But I still agree with you - would rather have seen Google not give in to this sort of thing at all.

It was very different for Meta - they already don't like sending people away from their site so it was much easier for them to hold out.