You keep hearing names that come back: Mila, Scale AI, Element AI. Are they companies? Universities? Cults? I’ll explain them like you’re at a party and someone says “oh, you work at Mila? Cool, explain what that is.”<\/p>\n
Mila is the AI Research Lab. Founded in 2017, led by Yoshua Bengio (yes, that guy), it lives at the Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al but isn’t directly “the university.”<\/p>\n
Think of it as a research temple. Researchers from around the world come here. Google, Meta, Microsoft fund them. But it’s not a company \u2014 it’s a public lab working on foundational problems in deep learning.<\/p>\n
That’s where the real ideas are born. Not products \u2014 the ideas that will change the game in 5-10 years.<\/p>\n
Element AI was founded in 2016 by people from Mila. It was a startup that sold real AI for real businesses \u2014 not just research.<\/p>\n
They raised cash quickly, launched products, attracted investors. But after a few years, they were acquired by ServiceTitan (an American software company). So technically? No longer an independent Quebec startup. But the AI team remains in Montreal.<\/p>\n
Element’s story? It’s the typical Quebec tech story: excellent researchers, promising products, acquired by the Americans.<\/p>\n
Scale AI is an accelerator. They look for promising AI startups and say “we’ll give you cash, offices, contacts, and you’ll become giants.”<\/p>\n
Are they an AI company? No. Are they crucial? Absolutely. Without Scale AI, half of Quebec’s AI startups wouldn’t exist.<\/p>\n
They’re the wind under the wings. Not the pilot \u2014 but without the wind, the pilot crashes.<\/p>\n
After that? Dozens of startups. Labs at Polytechnique. Teams in universities. Older companies starting to do AI (Intact, for example).<\/p>\n
But honestly? If you understand Mila, Element, and Scale AI, you understand 80% of what’s happening in Quebec AI. They’re the three amigos the whole world watches.<\/p>\n
Because if you work in tech, you’ll run into these names. Because if you want to invest, launch a startup, or just understand the context, this is the foundation.<\/p>\n
And also? Because being proud of “our” AI ecosystem is a bit weird if you can’t name the three biggest pieces of the puzzle.<\/p>\n
Want to explore the Quebec AI ecosystem further? Sherpa<\/a> is your friend, or go deeper with Laeka Research<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You keep hearing names that come back: Mila, Scale AI, Element AI. Are they companies? Universities? Cults? I’ll explain them…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":135,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_kad_post_transparent":"","_kad_post_title":"","_kad_post_layout":"","_kad_post_sidebar_id":"","_kad_post_content_style":"","_kad_post_vertical_padding":"","_kad_post_feature":"","_kad_post_feature_position":"","_kad_post_header":false,"_kad_post_footer":false,"_kad_post_classname":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[193],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-750","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai-in-quebec"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=750"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/750\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=750"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=750"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/laeka.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=750"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}