Mila
academicMila (the Quebec AI Institute) is one of the world's largest academic deep-learning communities, with 1,000+ researchers centered on the Université de Montréal and Polytechnique Montréal. It was founded by Yoshua Bengio (Turing Award), who in June 2025 moved to a founder/scientific-advisor role and launched the LawZero AI-safety nonprofit (tracked separately); Hugo Larochelle, previously head of Google DeepMind's Montreal lab, was named Scientific Director in September 2025.
Mila's flagship foundation-model output centers on Sarath Chandar's lab: AMPLIFY (protein language model), NeoBERT, NovoMolGen, and CADmium. Complementary lines include Aaron Courville's RL post-training work (VinePPO), Irina Rish's scaling-dynamics research, and GFlowNets — Generative Flow Networks, a foundational technique that originated at Mila (Bengio, 2021).
Bengio also chairs the International AI Safety Report, whose expert-panel role is retained for Mila and is distinct from his LawZero nonprofit. The CAD $250M LaSalle Sovereign AI Research Hub (with 5C and Hypertec) adds up to 3 MW of Canadian sovereign GPU capacity.
People
- Yoshua Bengio Google Scholar — Founder & Scientific Advisor, Mila (Université de Montréal); Chair, International AI Safety Report (formerly Founder, LawZero (2025))
- Sarath Chandar Google Scholar — Associate Professor, Polytechnique Montréal / Mila; Canada CIFAR AI Chair
- Aaron Courville Google Scholar — Professor, Université de Montréal / Mila
- Irina Rish Google Scholar — Professor, Université de Montréal / Mila; CERC-AAI Chair
- Hugo Larochelle Google Scholar — Scientific Director, Mila (since Sept 2025) (formerly Head, Google DeepMind Montreal)
News
- 2025-09-02 Hugo Larochelle named Mila Scientific Director — Mila
- 2025-09-01 Mila unveils CAD $250M LaSalle Sovereign AI Research Hub — Mila