Several leading figures in AI, including LeCun, have studied or taught at Canadian universities. Reinforcement learning builds on deep learning to let machines learn through experimentation. Michael Bowling, a U.S.-born computer scientist who leads a lab at the University of Alberta that has produced cutting-edge poker-playing machines, says the new Facebook lab simply shows that Canada already leads the rest of the world in AI. Indeed, after seeing AI researchers snapped up by big U.S. companies in recent years, Canada may well hope that the environment fostered by new labs, including the one in Montreal, will eventually produce companies that rival the likes of Facebook.

If we sum up all the available numbers for AI research investments (including other government funding like the $93.5M awarded to IVADO by the Canada Research Excellence Fund last September, as well as private funds invested in public or semi-public labs) we end up with close to $500M in funding across the country. Beyond that, when we look up other domains that work hand in hand with AI, such as Big Data, cloud infrastructure and the like, that number grows even higher. What made Silicon Valley's talent pump work up to now was its ecosystem of large firms and venture capital feeding startups, as well as research who in turn generate the innovations to push the large firms forward. With investments from the federal and provincial governments in research, as well as from Big Tech, the Canadian talent pump is growing quickly.