If you use AI, here’s how to keep your data out of American hands.

Hello there, welcome back to my series replacing American tech with Canadian versions. Today, AI. And look, I get it, not everyone thinks that AI should be a thing, but if you use it, here is how to keep the sensitive data you put into it out of the hands of the American government. I've been testing Agour for about a week now and it's pretty solid. It's like Claude or ChatGPT. You can ask it questions, you can upload files, you can add things for it to remember about you. There are projects it can research on the web and so on. Everything is run from Montreal and no American company or government can tie you to what you type into it. None of what you put into it is used for AI training and the The model itself started as an open source model from Europe, which they have customized. 4 people run this thing right now. They're all Canadian, including one of them who's camera shy. They have about 2,000 users. They've been open for about 2 months. They do not have mobile apps right now, but you can still use it on your phone. You just access it through your web browser. Now, as for how good it is, it's good for about like 95, 96% of what I asked of it. It did as good a job as the big American tools. It even managed my favorite trick question to ask AI bots. You would be surprised how many can't do this. There are glitches. In one case, it asked me if I wanted to get more information about something, so I said "yes," and it did, accurately, but it claimed the sources it used for that follow-up question were all from pages about the word "yes." It can keep a memory about you, which it mostly got right. Yes, I like puzzles. Yes, I'm involved in the infusion movement. But "the user is unreliable at predicting bureaucratic processing times due to lack of insight into real-time application handling delays"? The fuck did you just call me? But those were definitely the outliers. Almost everything I threw at it, it handled just fine. Now besides keeping your data away from the US, it's actually cheaper than the bigger platforms. There's a free tier that you can use up to 50 times a day, and their Pro plan lets you have unlimited messages for $20 a month. That's $20 Canadian, remember. I also have an honorable mention. There is something called CanadaGPT.ca, and it's pretty cool. It's not a general purpose chatbot. It lets you track the federal government's legislation, lobbying. You can check up on your MP and find out how much they're charging you for expenses. How often they're there for votes, what meetings they've taken with lobbyists, and that sort of thing. Check my previous videos for Canadian replacements for Google, Facebook, Twitter, Spotify, and Google Docs, and tell me in the comments what tech you'd like me to replace next.