Rich in AI leaders, Canada cashes in on talent

TORONTO — Long before Google started working on cars that drive themselves and Amazon was creating appliances that talk, a handful of researchers in Canada — backed by the Canadian government and universities — were laying the groundwork for today’s boom in artificial intelligence.

But the center of the commercial gold rush has been a long way away, in Silicon Valley. In recent years, many of Canada’s young AI scientists, lured by lucrative paydays from Google, Facebook, Apple and other companies, have departed. Canada is producing a growing number of AI startups, but they often head to California, where venture capital, business skills and optimism are abundant.

“Canada is not really reaping the benefits from this AI technical leadership and decades of investment by the Canadian government,” said Tiff Macklem, former senior deputy governor of the Bank of Canada, who is dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.

Now bringing AI home is a priority for the Canadian government, companies, universities and technologists. The goal, they say, is to build a business environment around the country’s expertise and to keep the experts its universities create in the country.

And they want to build on the tenacity of veteran researchers like Geoffrey Hinton, Richard Sutton and Yoshua Bengio, who developed techniques that opened the door to remarkable improvements in an AI technology called machine learning, even as many computer scientists and the tech industry considered their work to be an unpromising backwater.

There are encouraging signs, including new government funding, big investments and the changing habits of entrepreneurs and U.S. venture capitalists.

In its new budget, the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged $93 million to support AI research centers in Toronto, Montreal and Edmonton, which will be public-private collaborations.

Major technology companies, like Google, Microsoft and IBM, are adding to their AI research teams in Canada.

One of the X factors in Canada’s drive to develop an AI industry is the Trump administration. Canadian AI scientists say they have received a stream of inquiries from U.S. researchers, concerned about the new administration’s stance on immigration and other policies.

Should there be a northward migration it wouldn’t the first time. Hinton settled in Canada in 1987 in part because of the United States’ clandestine support for the Contra guerrillas who sought to overthrow the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

Sutton left the United States to become a professor at the University of Alberta in 2003, after U.S. troops landed in Baghdad. “George Bush was invading Iraq,” he said. “It was a good time to leave.”