[1] Along with Alberta's Amii and Toronto's Vector Institute, Mila is part of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy.

[2] Mila traces its foundations to the Laboratoire d'informatique des systèmes adaptatifs (LISA)[3] at the Université de Montréal and to the Reasoning and Learning Lab (RL-Lab)[4] at McGill University.

LISA was founded in 1993 by Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner and one of the founders of the field of deep learning[5][6][7] while the RL-Lab was founded in 2001 and is currently co-directed by Professors Prakash Panangaden, Doina Precup, Joëlle Pineau, and Jackie Chi Kit Cheung.

In December 2020, Mila teamed up with IBM to accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning research using open-source technology in a bid to integrate the Quebec institute’s open-source software, Oríon, with IBM’s Watson Machine Learning Accelerator, an AI model training and inference tool that the tech giant offers to businesses.

[8] Besides Bengio, Mila's faculty members include Joëlle Pineau and Doina Precup.