Mila

Montreal, Quebec, Canada

mature1200 peopleFounded 1993

Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute is the world's largest concentration of deep learning academic researchers, founded in 1993 by Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio at the Universite de Montreal. A nonprofit since 2018, the institute brings together over 1,400 researchers, professors, and students from leading Quebec universities including Universite de Montreal, McGill University, Polytechnique Montreal, and HEC Montreal. Mila's research spans language modeling, machine translation, object recognition, generative models, reinforcement learning, and responsible AI. The institute has made AI safety and responsible development a fundamental component of its mission, with over 30 professors and 50 researchers working at the intersection of trust, security, and artificial intelligence, including alignment, fairness, privacy, and robustness research.

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Theory of Change

Mila's theory of change rests on the premise that concentrating world-class AI research talent in an academic setting, with responsible AI as a core strategic pillar, can shape the trajectory of AI development toward beneficial outcomes. By training the next generation of AI researchers with safety and ethics as integral values, conducting foundational research on alignment, fairness, robustness, and interpretability, and translating these findings into policy recommendations and real-world safeguards (such as the AI Safety Studio), Mila aims to ensure that advanced AI systems are developed responsibly. The institute's influence extends through its founder Yoshua Bengio's global advocacy for AI safety regulation, its contributions to international AI safety reports and policy frameworks, and its position as a central node in Canada's national AI strategy. Mila believes that by embedding safety research within a top-tier AI research institution rather than treating it as a separate endeavor, safety considerations will be more deeply integrated into the mainstream of AI development.