New era at Mila as Hugo Larochelle named scientific director

Hugo Larochelle has been appointed the new scientific director of Mila, Montréal’s artificial intelligence (AI) institute, filling a role once held by his former academic supervisor, Yoshua Bengio.

Larochelle succeeds Laurent Charlin, associate professor at HEC Montréal, who took over as interim scientific director in May after Bengio moved to an advisor role. The new director is an adjunct professor at the Université de Montréal and the former head of the Google Brain research lab in the city.

“I view AI as a key for bringing more intelligence into our economy.”
Hugo Larochelle

In an interview with BetaKit, Larochelle said his priorities are to maintain Mila’s “high calibre of research” in AI, help professors and students commercialize their work, and support the creation of new startups.

“I think we could do more, and I think we need to be ambitious,” Larochelle said.

The new scientific director was chosen by a committee selected by Mila’s board of directors and scientific council. Larochelle will now chair the council and lead the institute’s scientific research direction.

Mila was founded in 1993 by Bengio, a Turing Award winner and leading computer scientist. Since then, the non-profit organization has grown into a joint initiative between leading academic institutions in Québec, including Université de Montréal and McGill University. Mila and its sister organizations, Toronto’s Vector Institute and Edmonton’s Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute (Amii), are funded by the federal government through the Pan-Canadian AI Strategy.

In addition to hosting academic research into AI and machine learning, Mila serves as a research hub for industry partners that include Canadian startups Protexxa and AbCellera. It also has a research partnership with enterprise AI startup Cohere, whose new chief AI scientist, Joelle Pineau, is a core academic member at Mila.

Larochelle worked with Bengio on his doctoral project, with the two publishing multiple papers looking at new approaches for training deep learning algorithms. In a statement, Bengio called Larochelle an “exceptional researcher” and said he has the “rigour, creativity and vision” required to lead the organization’s scientific work.

Bengio has since founded LawZero, a new AI safety research institute focused on agentic AI. LawZero counts former startup executives Sam Ramadori and Philippe Beaudoin among its core team, and is Bengio’s answer to the perceived dangers of autonomous AI agents, which he has said pose “catastrophic” risks if developed irresponsibly.

Larochelle told BetaKit that he is “vigilant” about some aspects of AI, but believes the technology is ready to be adopted widely across businesses. He’s also excited about the federal government’s newfound focus on promoting AI adoption.

“I view AI as a key for bringing more intelligence into our economy,” Larochelle said. “I think we’ll play a big role in nurturing that technology the right way.”

The new Mila leader went on to study under another Canadian AI “godfather,” the Nobel Prize winner Geoffrey Hinton, for his postdoctoral degree. Larochelle’s research has helped advance concepts now used frequently in generative AI. This includes zero-shot learning, where an AI model can correctly generalize tasks to new categories that were not included in its training data.

Beyond research, Larochelle also has experience in the startup space. He co-founded machine learning startup Whetlab alongside other U of T alumni, which Twitter acquired in 2015. After a brief time at Twitter’s machine learning division, he was recruited to lead Google’s AI research lab in Montreal (Google Brain), which is now part of Google DeepMind.

Larochelle said his experience at Google, where he managed a team of independent researchers pursuing multiple avenues, will help inform his leadership approach at Mila.

“I’m there to nudge [researchers] in interesting directions,” Larochelle said. He’s also looking forward to pursuing his own research, which includes exploring AI uses for monitoring biodiversity with satellites.

Feature image courtesy CNW Group/Mila – Quebec AI Institute