The Globe and Mail reports in its Thursday edition that artificial intelligence pioneer Yoshua Bengio says regulation in Canada is on the right path, but progress is far too sluggish. A Canadian Press dispatch to The Globe says that speaking in Montreal, the University of Montreal professor said he backed a bill tabled in the House last June that adopts a more general, principles-based approach to AI guardrails and leaves details to a later date. However, Ottawa has said the act known as Bill C-27 will come into force no sooner than 2025. "That's way too slow," Dr. Bengio said Wednesday. "There are simple things that could happen that don't need two years to be figured out." He is calling on the federal government to begin rolling out rules immediately against certain threats, such as "counterfeiting humans" using AI-driven bots. Dr. Bengio in 2019 won the Turing Award. In March, Dr. Bengio joined more than 1,000 artificial intelligence experts in calling for a six-month pause on training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 -- the large language model behind San Francisco-based OpenAI's ChatGPT. Co-signatories included engineers from Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft as well as Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak.