Welcome back to Lately, The Globe’s weekly tech newsletter. If you have feedback or just want to say hello to a real-life human, send me an e-mail. Also, a housekeeping note: While I gallivant in Thailand for the next two weeks, a couple of my Globe colleagues will be taking over Lately. I’ll be back in your inboxes on Dec. 12.
In this week’s issue:
💰 Are Canadian companies seeing high ROI on artificial intelligence?
🤖 Google launches Gemini 3
🫣 With AI, we’re now the product
🎤 Enter the Nardwuar vault
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
As bubble fears grow, only 2 per cent of Canadian businesses getting return on AI investments
Canadian companies are shelling out on artificial intelligence tools to boost productivity and lower costs, but has it paid off? According to a new survey from KPMG, more Canadian organizations are using AI in some way, but only 2 per cent are seeing a return on their investments.
One of the reasons has to do with how difficult and time-consuming it can be to deploy AI across an entire company, and educate employees about how to best use that tech in their work. Companies also need to organize their private data in a way that can be useful for AI applications, as well as consistently track the resulting outcomes. Despite these challenges, around 30 per cent of respondents say they expect their AI investments to provide a return within the year.
As U.S. tech companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars and take on more debt to build out data centres, fears are growing that all this investment is creating a bubble. Chip maker Nvidia is hoping its blockbuster quarterly earnings this week will calm those worries, but the results are unlikely to dispel long-term concerns. Read Joe Castaldo’s full story.
Google launches Gemini 3, plus a new coding platform
This week, Google released Gemini 3, its latest AI model that has updated reasoning, coding and multimedia capabilities. Alongside the base model, Google also launched Antigravity, a juiced-up coding platform powered by Gemini, and Nano Banana Pro, its newest image-generation model that can create more detailed images and accurate text. In the race for AI supremacy, it appears that Google is gaining a foothold over OpenAI. The company is nearing a US$1-billion-per-year deal with Apple to use a Google AI model for the Siri voice assistant, according to reporting from Bloomberg, while OpenAI’s latest frontier model GPT-5 failed the hype test.
DATA
With AI, you are now the product
If you want to use popular digital services, chances are you’re also fuelling the AI products that these companies then sell back to you. In a new opinion piece, Globe contributing columnist Vass Bednar explains how the open internet is being incrementally enclosed behind AI training loops.
“If you want your website to appear in Google’s search results, you have to allow Google’s crawler to index it. Historically, that was a pretty fair trade, as indexing brought visibility. But now, Google says that anything indexed for search can also be used to train its generative AI models. Decline the AI crawler, and your site effectively disappears from search,” writes Bednar.
“This extractive scenario is increasingly common. Zoom’s terms give the company broad rights to use ‘service-generated data’ – such as usage patterns and behavioural metrics – to train its AI models, even if users decline to share their actual meeting content. Reddit is licensing major deals to allow external use of its content for AI training, capitalizing on the information that Redditors freely contribute.”
Bednar notes that although Canadian regulators haven’t been reacting to these issues, digital businesses in the United States and the European Union have taken legal action against Google. Read the full op-ed.
What else we’re reading this week:
Cohere is Canada’s biggest AI hope. Why is it so American? (The Walrus)
The trad movement is sputtering. Here’s what comes next (GQ)
Inside a wild bitcoin heist: Five-star hotels, cash-stuffed envelopes and vanishing funds (WIRED)
Adult Money
HOLIDAY WISH LIST
This hand-held console is a perfect gift for nostalgic gamers and those who are embracing “dumb tech."Mark Binks/The Globe and Mail
ModRetro Chromatic console, $290
I’m a sucker for nostalgia, so I’m adding this Game Boy-inspired hand-held console by ModRetro to my wish list. It apparently features the world’s first “pixel-accurate” compatible cartridge system that can play original Game Boy games, as well as new titles created for Chromatic. This seems like the perfect gift for other nostalgic gamers and those who are embracing “dumb tech” such as flip phones, point-and-shoot cameras and Discman players.
Culture radar
MUSIC
How interviewer Nardwuar rose from Canadian cult hero to global phenomenon
Nardwuar in the basement of Neptoon Records.Alana Paterson/The Globe and Mail
It’s likely that your age will determine how you first encountered Nardwuar. If you’re of a certain vintage, you may remember him as the journalist who asked then-prime minister Jean Chrétien a question at the 1997 APEC summit about using pepper spray on protesters, to which the politician glibly replied: “For me, pepper, I put it on my plate.”
If you’re a Gen X or millennial, it was likely on MuchMusic, where as a bombastic, tartan-clad interviewer, he peppered musicians with obscure questions and factoids. If you’re Gen Z or younger, TikTok was your first introduction, perhaps through one of his viral interviews with Tyler, The Creator, Timothée Chalamet or Sabrina Carpenter.
This month, I profiled the 57-year-old interviewer, who has transcended Canadian cult hero status to become a global phenomenon. I visited him in his hometown of Vancouver, where we chatted about handling rejection, his DIY ethics and the interview subjects that have eluded him so far. Read my full profile.