Google announced today that it will extend funding for AI research at the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA). The company will invest a total of C$4.5 million, or about US$3.4 million, to fund seven faculty members across the institute, as well as MILA faculty at the University of Montreal and McGill University.

That funding will also continue to support Yoshua Bengio, one of the few deep-learning experts currently working. There's no doubt that Google is hoping to expand its AI and deep-learning expertise by investing in folks like Benigo.

Google also announced it will be opening up a deep-learning and AI research group at its offices in Montreal. The group is linked to the Google Brain team, which already works to bring AI technology across the company, and it will be headed by another deep-learning expert, Hugo Larochelle. Google is clearly trying to hold on to as much deep-learning and AI talent as it can—having hired deep learning expert Geoff Hinton in 2013 from the University of Toronto—and keep them in space where that research is flourishing. Montreal has become a destination for AI startups and affiliated research groups.

Google notes in its announcement that the University of Montreal and McGill University now have over 150 researchers focused on deep learning. However, many other huge companies including Facebook and Apple have been trying to snag AI talent and open up hubs across the globe. Facebook has an AI lab in New York and recently opened another in Paris, Apple hired Carnegie Mellon University AI professor Russ Salakhutdinov, and Amazon has ties to the same university. Most of these companies have only just started to incorporate AI into their products and services, and since there are not many experts out there yet, they all want to lock down their own talent as soon as possible.