[levesque]

I think he's capitalizing on the fact that the recent AI breakthroughs in deep learning originated from Montreal (Bengio et al.) and Toronto (Hinton et al.), thus all the big companies want to have satellite offices nearby and Canada becomes hot for AI. Nowadays, there are a lot of students graduating from those labs who may or may not stay in Canada and build on this expertise.

Other than that, I don't think Canada gets it more than the US, for instance. Government is shooting money into AI now that they realized there was massive potential for growth, but I think it's still early to see how many Canadian AI companies will emerge from this (Element AI would be an early one).

[mfoy_]

I do think that Canada is more... open to suggestion than America. So perhaps he merely means that Canadians don't mind being guinea pigs for the greater good as much? Canada is more of a "social capitalism", as opposed to America.