Six Montrealbased AI firms to get $6.3M in federal loans
The federal government is investing $6.3 million in six Montreal-based artificial intelligence companies, Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains said on Wednesday. Most of that money — $5 million will go to Element AI, the artificial intelligence company co-founded by Yoshua Bengio, a Université de Montréal professor and one of the pioneers of the AI technology known as deep learning. On Tuesday, Bengio criticized the way the federal government handled the processing of visa applications by foreign researchers who wanted to attend the Neural Information Processing Systems conference underway in Montreal. “It’s a shame for Canada and it goes against what we’ve been professing, what we’ve been saying around the world, the values that our government has been putting forward,” Bengio said. He warned that visa rejections and delays would push the organizers of the AI conferences to hold them outside the country. But Bains said he doesn’t believe the federal government visa policies are undermining its effort to make Canada an AI hub. “We’re a world leader in artificial intelligence,” he said. In “Montreal 75,000 workers are connected to artificial intelligence, and it’s got the highest concentration of students and researchers, so this is a point of pride and that’s why the conference is here.” Organizers of Black In AI, an event that is taking place alongside the NeurIPS conference in Montreal, say half of the researchers who had planned on attending were either denied visas or didn’t hear back from the Canadian government in time. That includes researchers who applied for visas more than six weeks before the start of the conference and researchers from prestigious universities. “With respect to this specific conference, with respect to researchers and experts coming from abroad, we’ll work with the organizers to make sure that if there’s any issues that they’ve raised, that we can deal with them in a timely manner. But fundamentally, our government believes in immigration, our government believes in being open to people and ideas,” he said. However, Black in AI organizer Timnit Gebru said that even though the event was registered with the federal government, applicants still faced issues like being falsely accused of having fake letters of invitation. The federal money announced on Wednesday comes in the form of a repayable contribution or loan. Imagia, which uses AI to help doctors make medical diagnoses, will receive $1,000,000. The rest of the money will be split between Roof.ai, C2RO Cloud Robotics, ARA Robotics and Keatext. “Advancements in AI technology will create new sources of economic growth, some have estimated $15.7 trillion by 2030 associated with artificial intelligence in economic activity, we want a slice of that pie,” Bain said.