CALGARY⁠ — DeepMind, Google’s renowned artificial intelligence research arm, is closing its Edmonton office as parent company Alphabet prepares to cut about 12,000 staff. 

The decision, first reported by Bloomberg, is a setback for Alberta’s AI research sector, which had been riding high as one of the pillars of the federal government’s pan-Canadian AI strategy—a $444-million effort to bolster the country’s machine learning know-how. 

University of Alberta spinoff Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (AMII), which had partnered with DeepMind in Edmonton, said the closure “hits close to home as it impacts many of our peers and friends in the DeepMind office and our tech community at large.” 

Here’s what you need to know: 

Why it matters: 

DeepMind Alberta, as the Edmonton lab is called, was the company’s first expansion beyond the United Kingdom’s borders in 2017, and was hailed as “an historic move for the AI community” in the province at the time.

The lab was built around Richard Sutton, an Edmonton-based researcher who literally wrote the textbook on modern reinforcement learning, a class of techniques that teach AI programs through a combination of rewards and repetition. AMII, for its part, is one of three groups that form the nucleus of Ottawa’s national AI strategy, which The Logic has previously outlined in detail. 

Reinforced learning techniques used by Sutton and others formed the foundation of AlphaGo, the DeepMind software program that generated international headlines when it triumphed over the world’s best player of Go, an ancient Chinese board game. DeepMind has also developed AlphaFold, a technology that predicts the shape of proteins to help researchers develop crucial remedies for diseases and viruses quicker. 

What’s next? 

Google Canada confirmed to The Logic that it is consolidating its Edmonton lab with its remaining offices in Montreal and Toronto, which are set to remain open. Engineers and researchers will be given the offer to transfer to other locations, but all other staff will be laid off. 

AMII CEO Cam Linke said that despite the “difficult news” of the closure, DeepMind “is only one area of impact in our very robust ecosystem,” stressing that it is working with hundreds of companies to commercialize various AI technologies in the province. In a statement, University of Alberta interim dean Matina Kalcounis-Rueppell said she was “saddened” by the decision, saying the university’s partnership with DeepMind was “instrumental in helping Edmonton and Alberta’s tech community flourish.”

Whether Sutton, who did not respond to a request for comment, and other researchers decide to remain in Alberta or transfer to DeepMind offices will likely carry significant weight in the local AI ecosystem. 

Either way, DeepMind’s presence in Edmonton appears to be a key draw for the researcher.

“So, I could go to some other university elsewhere in the world,” Sutton said in a November 2021 interview with The Logic. “But I’ve got roots here, I’ve got the DeepMind office and everything. And all that makes me want to stay here.”

With files from Murad Hemmadi