The use of artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly gaining momentum given the rush by various tech firms to invest in it, Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) subsidiary Google being in the lead. The search engine is spreading its wings into the Canadian market, and in over three years, it will invest $4.5 million in its new Montreal AI research outpost. The funding is purposed to help in paying for seven faculty members across various Montreal academic institutions as well as continued support for deep learning expert Yoshua Bengio’s work.
The Universite de Montreal professor says that the institute has been attracting interest from most of the major IT companies who are even willing to be part of the funding. Notably, both the machine learning and AI research have become significant to many businesses even as Google continues to bet on Canada’s high expertise. Bengio adds that AI will affect virtually every economic sector.
Deep learning will enable feeding of quantities of data into software systems
Google’s move comes at a time when the Canadian government is taking up the obligation of investing more that $200 million in three Montreal universities, one of them being lab Bengio. It is one of the largest in the world that is dedicated to studying Deep Learning. Apparently, the rise of deep learning has been credited by many given that it has helped in training computers recognize objects in pictures. It has also enabled the keying in of data into software systems called neural nets.
It may not be easy to accomplish the goal, but many believe it is doable. Bengio says, “At some point, you’ll just talk to computers, and they’ll understand what you want and what you need. It may take years, but we’re clearly going in that direction.”
The investment is worth it
There are more than 150 researchers involved in deep learning according to Shibl Mourad, Google Montreal head of engineering. There are also lots of benefits from the $213 million federal A.I. grant because part of it will be redirected to the building of a new AI institute called IVADO. While all the new investments have a role to play they are also a hopeful sign of the return of former Montrealer Hugo Larochelle to head up Google’s new research group.
Alphabet stock was trading at $784.80 an increase of $8.83 or 1.14%.
