Governments must focus on growing local AI firms, council hears

International companies create jobs, but not wealth, UdeM professor says

Governments in Canada need to think more about investing in local artificial intelligence companies than encouraging international companies to expand to Canada, according to one of Montreal’s most prominent artificial intelligence researchers.

Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the Université de Montréal and the co-founder of Element AI, an artificial intelligence company, said that while the arrival of major companies like Facebook, Samsung and Google-affiliated DeepMind in Montreal is good for the local AI sector and will create good jobs, it won’t create enough wealth here.

Bengio made the comments during a talk before the Montreal Council on Foreign Relations on Wednesday.

“I’m really happy to see these international companies come to Montreal, but it’s not enough for us to take advantage of the wealth that AI is going to create. We need to have Canadian companies paying taxes here that are really leaders in the field,” he told the Montreal Gazette after the discussion.

It’s important, he said, because while AI will create enormous wealth, there will also be social costs, particularly in the job market during the next 10 to 20 years.

“It’s going to cost a lot of money to retrain people who are in the middle of their career and have to find another job,” he said.

Bengio was speaking as part of a panel discussion on Technopolys, an organization formed in September to promote Quebec’s technology industry.

Bengio is one of the organization’s “ambassadors.”

While Montreal’s tech industry has made significant progress during the past 10 years, there’s still a lot of work to be done, said Sylvain Carle, a partner at Real Ventures, a venture-capital firm, and another one of the Technopolys “ambassadors” who spoke on Wednesday.

“We can be proud of what we’ve done, but we’re not so well-known internationally,” Carle said in an interview after the talk.

Building an international reputation is important, said Isabelle Bettez, the co-founder of 8D

We need to have Canadian companies paying taxes here that are really leaders in the field.

Technologies, whose products include Bixi docking stations and the parking terminals used in Montreal.

Coming from a region with a solid reputation provides “automatic credibility,” said Bettez, who is also an “ambassador” for the group.

“When you have people coming before you and they’re good, then you have that much done already. You have a lot of work to do still, but the brand is doing a lot of work for you,” Bettez said.

But Carle said it’s not just about building a brand.

The organization aims to connect university researchers, startups, medium-sized businesses and big companies in an effort to improve the local tech industry as a whole.