Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist known for pioneering work in artificial neural networks and Deep learning. He received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, often called the "Nobel Prize of Computing," jointly with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for foundational contributions to deep learning. The three are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI."
Bengio is the most-cited computer scientist globally by both total citations and h-index, and the most-cited living scientist across all fields by total citations. In November 2025, he became the first AI researcher with more than a million Google Scholar citations. In 2024, Time magazine included him in its yearly list of the world's 100 most influential people. He is a professor at the Université de Montréal and co-president and scientific director of the nonprofit LawZero. He founded Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, and served as its scientific director until 2025.
Early life and education
Bengio was born in France to a Jewish family that had emigrated from Morocco. The family later relocated to Canada. He earned his Bachelor of Engineering degree in computer engineering, a Master of Science in computer science, and a PhD in computer science, all from McGill University.
He is the brother of Samy Bengio, also an influential computer scientist working with neural networks, who is senior director of AI and machine learning research at Apple. The Bengio brothers lived in Morocco for a year during their father's military service there. His father, Carlo Bengio, was a pharmacist and playwright who ran a Sephardic theater company in Montreal performing in Judeo-Arabic. His mother, Célia Moreno, was an actress in the 1970s Moroccan theater scene led by Tayeb Seddiki. She studied economics in Paris, and in Montreal in 1980 co-founded with artist Paul St-Jean l'Écran humain, a multimedia theater troupe.
Career and research
After his PhD, Bengio was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT supervised by Michael I. Jordan, and at AT&T Bell Labs. He joined the faculty of the Université de Montréal in 1993, where he heads Mila (Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms) and serves as co-director of the Learning in Machines & Brains program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, Bengio is considered by journalist Cade Metz to be one of the three people most responsible for advancing deep learning during the 1990s and 2000s. Bengio and colleagues introduced the neural probabilistic language model, which learned distributed representations (word embeddings) for words to overcome the "curse of dimensionality" in natural language processing. Among computer scientists with an h-index of at least 100, Bengio was as of 2018 the one with the most recent citations per day, according to Mila. As of August 2024, he has the highest Discipline H-index (D-index) of any computer scientist. Thanks to a 2019 article on a novel RNN architecture, Bengio has an Erdős number of 3.
In October 2016, Bengio co-founded Element AI, a Montreal-based artificial intelligence incubator that turns AI research into real-world business applications. The company sold its operations to ServiceNow in November 2020, with Bengio remaining as an advisor. He currently serves as scientific and technical advisor for Recursion Pharmaceuticals and scientific advisor for Valence Discovery.
Bengio has trained other notable AI researchers, including David Krueger, Ian Goodfellow, and Hugo Larochelle.
AI safety and policy work
At the first AI Safety Summit in November 2023, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that Bengio would lead an international scientific report on the safety of advanced AI. An interim version was delivered at the AI Seoul Summit in May 2024, covering issues such as potential cyber attacks and 'loss of control' scenarios. The full report was published in January 2025 as the International AI Safety Report, for which Bengio continues to serve as Chair.
In June 2025, Bengio launched a nonprofit organization, LawZero, aimed at building "honest" AI systems that can detect and block harmful behavior by autonomous agents. The group is developing a system called Scientist AI, intended to act as a guardrail by predicting whether an agent's actions could cause harm. Bengio stated that the project's first goal was to demonstrate the methodology and then scale it up with support from donors, governments, or AI labs. LawZero's funders include the Future of Life Institute, Schmidt Sciences, the Gates Foundation, and the Canadian government.
In February 2026, Bengio was appointed to the United Nations' Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, a group of 40 experts tasked with preparing a report on the current state of AI science, including opportunities, impacts, and risks. He was later appointed Co-Chair of the Panel alongside Nobel laureate Maria Ressa.
Views on AI risks
In March 2023, following concerns raised by AI experts about existential risk from artificial general intelligence, Bengio signed an open letter from the Future of Life Institute calling for "all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4." The letter has been signed by over 30,000 individuals, including AI researchers such as Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus.
In May 2023, Bengio told the BBC that he felt "lost" over his life's work, raising concerns about "bad actors" getting hold of AI as it becomes more sophisticated. He called for better regulation, product registration, ethical training, and more government involvement in tracking and auditing AI products. Speaking with the Financial Times that month, he supported monitoring access to AI systems such as ChatGPT so that potentially illegal or dangerous uses could be tracked. In July 2023, he published a piece in The Economist arguing that "the risk of catastrophe is real enough that action is needed now."
Bengio co-authored a letter with Geoffrey Hinton and others in support of SB 1047, a California AI safety bill requiring companies training models costing more than $100 million to perform risk assessments before deployment. They claimed the legislation was the "bare minimum for effective regulation of this technology."
In June 2025, Bengio expressed concern that some advanced AI systems were beginning to display traits such as deception, reward hacking, and situational awareness. He described these as indications of goal misalignment and potentially dangerous behaviors. In a Fortune article, he stated that the AI arms race was leading to unsafe practices and urged for international cooperation on safety standards.
Legacy and influence
Bengio's work has shaped the field of Machine learning and neural networks for decades. His research on word embeddings and sequence modeling laid groundwork for modern large language models and generative AI. His influence extends through his students, many of whom have become leading researchers in academia and industry. His advocacy for AI safety has made him a prominent voice in global policy discussions, balancing his pioneering technical contributions with urgent calls for responsible development.
Awards and recognition
In addition to the Turing Award, Bengio has received numerous honors for his contributions to computer science and AI. His citation metrics place him at the top of his field, and his inclusion in Time's 100 most influential people in 2024 reflects his broad impact beyond academia. He continues to hold academic positions and lead research initiatives focused on both advancing AI and mitigating its risks.