Mila

Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, originally the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (LISA), was founded in 1993 by Professor Yoshua Bengio at the Universite de Montreal. Bengio, who received the 2018 ACM Turing Award alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for foundational work on deep learning, remains the most-cited living scientist across all fields by total citations. Mila acquired nonprofit status in 2018 and has grown into the world's largest academic deep learning research center. The institute is a unique collaboration between Universite de Montreal and McGill University, in close partnership with Polytechnique Montreal and HEC Montreal, and also welcomes professors from Universite Laval, Universite de Sherbrooke, Ecole de technologie superieure, and Concordia University. As of late 2025, the Mila community includes over 1,400 individuals, with more than 140 affiliated professors and over 1,200 student researchers. Mila-affiliated faculty have over 650 projects underway and publish more than 700 peer-reviewed articles annually, with strong representation at top conferences such as NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML. Mila's research spans deep learning, reinforcement learning, language modeling, machine translation, object recognition, generative models, and applied AI in health, environment, energy, and robotics. Responsible AI has been central to Mila's mission since its founding. Over 30 professors and 50 researchers work at the intersection of trust, security, and AI, contributing to alignment, bias mitigation, privacy, and AI safety research. In October 2025, Mila launched the AI Safety Studio, an initiative focused on developing concrete safeguards against harmful AI behaviors, with its first project addressing risks from chatbot misuse in youth mental health contexts. Mila is part of Canada's Pan-Canadian AI Strategy alongside the Vector Institute (Toronto) and Amii (Alberta). Its leadership includes Valerie Pisano as President and CEO, Hugo Larochelle (former head of Google's AI research lab) as Scientific Director since September 2025, and Yoshua Bengio as Founder and Scientific Advisor. Bengio has become one of the world's most prominent advocates for AI safety, signing the 2023 open letter calling for a pause on advanced AI training, contributing to the international AI safety dialogue, and launching LawZero, a nonprofit dedicated to building AI systems that can detect and block harmful autonomous agent behavior. Mila is primarily funded by the Quebec government through its AI ecosystem development strategy, the Government of Canada through CIFAR, and private sources. Major funding includes $80 million from Quebec over five years starting in 2018, a $21 million grant in 2023, and a $36 million grant announced in February 2026. Open Philanthropy has also supported Mila with a $2.4 million grant for AI safety research. In September 2025, Mila announced a $250 million partnership with 5C and Hypertec to create a Sovereign AI Research Hub at a new LaSalle campus, and is raising a $100 million USD venture capital fund with Inovia Capital to invest in AI startups from Canadian universities.