Jerald Sibbeston

A VIC-20 and a Three-Year-Old

When my brother brought home a Commodore VIC-20, I was three years old. I did not understand what I was looking at, but I understood something important: the machine was playing against me. That question — how does the computer know what to do? — has driven every decision I have made since. Watching Sid Meier's Civilization for the first time was a revelation. Here was a machine making strategic decisions across an entire simulated world. It was not following a script. It was evaluating, adapting, responding. The question from age three had not been answered; it had become infinitely deeper.

The Watson Moment

I was studying Canadian law and political science at university when IBM's Watson defeated the best human Jeopardy players on live television. In that moment I saw the future clearly: words and logic — the foundation of white-collar work — were about to become cheap. Abundant. Commoditized. I walked away from law school and spent the next decade doing something my professors would have called unfocused: I learned twenty percent of every major trade I could find. Electrical. Networking. Server administration. Carpentry. The thesis was simple — with twenty percent of each trade, you can do eighty percent of the work. When the machines come for the knowledge workers, the people who can build things with their hands will still be standing.

Tokenization and the LLM Era

The decade between Watson and ChatGPT was a slow burn. I watched tokenization advance from research curiosity to the foundation of the most powerful AI systems on Earth. Tokenization — often called the most boring end of artificial intelligence — has nonetheless produced the most dramatic results. It is expensive computationally and electrically, but the results speak for themselves, and they will only keep improving. When ChatGPT arrived in 2023, I knew the moment had come. I founded Yamoria to build sovereign AI infrastructure in Canada, on Canadian soil, under Canadian law.

Northern Roots, Northern Future

I am Métis, a member of Fort Simpson Métis Local 52. I was born in Yellowknife, spent thirty years in my hometown of Fort Simpson, and fifteen years in Yellowknife before moving to Edmonton in 2023. My father is Nick Sibbeston — former Premier of the Northwest Territories, retired Canadian Senator, residential school survivor, and the first Indigenous lawyer in the history of the NWT. He sits on Yamoria's board and speaks Athapaskan Slavey. My mother Karen and my father remain deeply connected to Sacred Heart parish and the community of Fort Simpson.

My dogs ZigZag the beagle and Maisy the wire-haired pointer keep me grounded. I love reggae. My favourite film is Life of Pi. My roots in the North run deep, and my deepest desire is to pass my skills on to young people in Fort Simpson and across the territories — to get them to the point of passing a CCNA exam and building real infrastructure with their own hands. This is what sovereign northern data looks like. True north, strong and free.