Samsung's AI research lab in Montreal/Courtesy of Samsung Electronics

Tech giant expands AI lab in Montreal

Samsung Electronics will expand its artificial intelligence (AI) lab in Montreal to beef up its fundamentals in AI research and drive competitiveness in such non-memory businesses as system semiconductors.

The Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT) lab is situated in Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (Mila), one of the world’s top research centers in deep learning. SAIT is a research arm of Samsung.

Samsung Electronics announced the plan on May 2, just a few days the Seoul-based tech giant announced its plan to spend around $115 billion by 2030 to sharpen its competitive edge in non-memory sectors.

Samsung is an indisputable global leader in the memory-chip industry, which offers huge profits. But the market is highly volatile and now shows clear signs of tailing off after years of booms.

This prompted Samsung to seek new revenue sources in the non-memory industry where the outfit has struggled to compete with such top-tier players as Intel and Qualcomm.

“Samsung’s collaboration with Mila is well established already and has been productive and built strong trust on both sides,” said Prof. Yoshua Bengio at the University of Montreal, who founded Mila.

“With a new SAIT lab in the midst of the recently inaugurated Mila building and many exciting research challenges ahead of us in AI, I expect even more mutually positive outcomes in the future.”

SAIT, which has actively collaborated with top AI authorities, also expressed big hopes on the expanded AI lab of Samsung.

On top of Prof. Bengio, it has worked with Prof. Yann LeCun at New York University. The two garnered the 2018 Turing Award, which is dubbed as the “Nobel Prize in computer science.”

“SAIT focuses on research and development – not only in next-generation semiconductor but also innovative AI as a seed technology in system semiconductors,” SAIT deputy chief Hwang Sung-woo said.

“SAIT AI Lab Montreal will play a key role within Samsung to redefine AI theory and deep learning algorithm for the next 10 years.”

 

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