Canada’s program to recruit and retain top AI researchers has allocated all its funding ahead of the federal government’s anticipated announcement of an updated national strategy for the technology.

On Thursday, the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) announced it would spend the last $24 million from the $162.2 million it administers to support 42 professors at nine universities. It’s among the final acts of Ottawa’s existing national AI strategy, first announced in the March 2017 federal budget and renewed four years later. 

Thursday’s awards bring the total number of AI chairs, which help AI institutes and schools pay for faculty and their labs, to 143 researchers. “We have reached our absolute critical mass,” said CIFAR executive director Elissa Strome, adding that the program is “bringing in really excellent people from around the world.”

The chair positions have five-year terms, taking this batch to the end of the program’s 10-year funding cycle in 2031. 

CIFAR and the three national AI institutes had asked the federal government last July for another $186 million to extend the program to 2036. Ottawa did not immediately agree to that request, instead announcing plans for a broader update to the national AI strategy, expected in the coming weeks. That’s been enough to tide the research program over till now, Strome said. “If there had been no conversation about AI for the last nine months, we would be in trouble.”

CIFAR’s July proposal had warned Canada would soon have “no instrument in place for additional AI talent recruitment.” By expanding the program, the group argued, Ottawa would send researchers a strong signal that they should choose Canada amid an “unprecedented global war for AI talent.”

All the current chair positions are funded until at least March 2027, so if the program is extended sometime this fiscal year as part of the impending AI strategy update, it will be able to renew those awards, according to Strome. “There’s no gap,” she claimed.

Three-quarters of the positions announced Thursday are tied to the Edmonton-based Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii). Renewed chairs there include Michael Bowling, Patrick Pilarski and Richard Sutton, a trio of renowned University of Alberta (U of A) computer science professors who previously led DeepMind’s since-closed outpost in the city. 

New appointments at the school include Blair Attard-Frost, a prominent voice in Canadian AI policy debates; programmer Jocelyn Chen and cognitive scientist Erin Grant, both recruited from New York University; and biologist Russell Dinnage, who came to U of A from Florida International University. 

Amii’s recent recruitment push has focused on researchers from outside computer science, who can instead bring AI to their fields of study, CEO Cam Linke said in an interview last August. “People who are bilingual—who have a foot in two different domains—are going to be really core drivers of the impact of AI.”

Mila scientific director Hugo Larochelle, a Université de Montréal professor, also had his chair renewed. So did two prominent Vector Institute faculty members in David Duvenaud, who works on AI safety at the University of Toronto and Jeff Clune, a University of British Columbia professor who recently co-founded Recursive Superintelligence, a startup trying to develop self-improving AI valued at US$4 billion in its first funding round.

AI Minister Evan Solomon said the appointments “will ensure that the AI of tomorrow is developed and deployed right here in Canada.”

Canada’s chairs program “is one of the strongest AI research clusters in the world,” Strome claimed. While Silicon Valley firms are offering a lot of money, she said, some of the field’s top talent is still choosing Canadian academic positions because of the quality of life here and the chance to join a network of researchers. “There is such diversity of expertise across the country,” she said.