I would've thought the whole Element AI debacle would've reined that in but I guess not? If the patron saint of DL can't keep a startup with 100M invested in it going, I don't even know what left, right, up and down are anymore.

At least a few of them found a niche and are doing okay, but it was almost funny to see the number of AI startups 3-4 years ago whose business model was essentially "hope businesses pay us to apply ML libraries to their data".

>Only $50k grants? You must have missed the AI startup wave here in Montreal.

Indeed, I certainly remember the days when Montreal was said to be the next "AI superpower".

How much of that was driven by the media predicting after Trump's election in 2016 that hordes of tech companies and employees would flee north of the border? (And how much of that reporting, in turn, was driven by smug Trudeau government bureaucrats who actually believed what they told sympathetic/gullible reporters?)

Yeah, that was such a sleazy move by these ML influences or whatever you call them. Have connections with government and the right degrees? Boom, now you taking photoshots with PM and syphoning hundreds of millions of dollars of public money. I think it's especially bad in QC where there is a lot of government support. There were a couple of startups in MTL that had absolutely nothing to show but a lot of PR and it was so so obvious.

It makes sense. Plausible business models can get normal business loans. Funding what no one else or not enough people are funding is typically the point of a grant.

SR&ED is just a nice-to-have break on taxes, no?

I wish they would cancel the SRED program and simply reduce business taxes in general. It is such a stupid drag on productivity and generally selects for things that sound cool to government bureaucrats while allowing for many juicy corruption opportunities.