Canada moves to bring AI expertise home

Toronto

LONG before Google started working on cars that drive themselves and Amazon was creating home appliances that talk, a handful of researchers in Canada - backed by the Canadian government and universities - were laying the groundwork for today's boom in artificial intelligence (AI).

But the centre of the commercial gold rush has been a long way away, in Silicon Valley. In recent years, many of Canada's young AI scientists, lured by lucrative salaries from Google, Facebook, Apple and other companies, have departed. Canada is producing a growing number of AI startups, but they often head to California, where venture capital, business skills and optimism are abundant.