Why tech giants like Google are investing in Montreal's artificial intelligence research lab Toronto Star

Shibl Mourad, the head of engineering for Google's Montreal office, says the company hopes to help turn the city into a "super-cluster" of AI knowledge that will attract corporate investors, burgeoning startups and researchers. He said much of the credit goes to Bengio and his colleagues, whose research over the last decade has put the city ahead of its competitors. Had these researchers not invested that decade of their lives, "we would not be where we are," Mourad said. The lab Bengio leads is one of the largest in the world dedicated to studying Deep Learning, one of the underpinnings of AI. Over the past decade, they learned that by layering several "neural networks" that mimic how the brain works, computer programs could "learn" to solve complex problems on their own instead of needing to be programmed step-by-step.