# Yoshua Bengio

Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist and pioneer of deep learning, co-recipient of the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award. He is a professor at the Université de Montréal and founder of Mila, the Quebec AI Institute.

Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist known for foundational contributions to 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 their work that enabled the modern [deep-learning](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/deep-learning) revolution. Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI." As of November 2025, Bengio became the first AI researcher to surpass one million citations on Google Scholar, and he is widely regarded as the most-cited computer scientist globally by both total citations and h-index. In 2024, Time magazine included him in its list of the 100 most influential people.

Bengio 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. His research has shaped [machine-learning](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/machine-learning) and [neural-network](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/neural-network) architectures, influencing fields from natural language processing to computer vision.

## 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 spent a year in Morocco during his father's military service. 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 Moroccan theater scene in the 1970s and later co-founded a multimedia theater troupe in Montreal. Bengio's brother, Samy Bengio, is also a prominent computer scientist and senior director of AI and ML research at [apple](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/apple).

Bengio earned his Bachelor of Engineering in computer engineering, a Master of Science in computer science, and a PhD in computer science, all from McGill University. His doctoral work laid the groundwork for his later innovations in [deep-learning](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/deep-learning).

## Career and research

After completing his PhD, Bengio was a postdoctoral fellow at [mit-csail](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/mit-csail) under Michael I. Jordan and at AT&T Bell Labs. He joined the faculty of the Université de Montréal in 1993, where he has remained for most of his career. He heads Mila (the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms) and co-directs the Learning in Machines & Brains program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.

Alongside Hinton and LeCun, Bengio is credited with advancing deep learning during the 1990s and 2000s. His early work introduced the neural probabilistic language model, which learned distributed representations (word embeddings) to overcome the "curse of dimensionality" in natural language processing. This concept became a cornerstone of modern [large-language-model](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/large-language-model)s. As of 2018, Bengio had the most recent citations per day among computer scientists with an h-index of at least 100, according to Mila. By August 2024, he held the highest Discipline H-index of any computer scientist. A 2019 article on a novel recurrent neural network architecture also gave him an Erdős number of 3.

In October 2016, Bengio co-founded Element AI, a Montreal-based incubator that turned AI research into commercial applications. ServiceNow acquired its operations in November 2020, with Bengio remaining as an advisor. He also serves as scientific and technical advisor for Recursion Pharmaceuticals and scientific advisor for Valence Discovery.

Bengio has trained many notable researchers, including Ian Goodfellow, Hugo Larochelle, and David Krueger, who have gone on to influence the field independently.

## AI safety and policy involvement

Bengio has become a prominent voice on AI safety and regulation. At the first AI Safety Summit in November 2023, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that Bengio would lead an international scientific report on advanced AI safety. An interim version was delivered at the AI Seoul Summit in May 2024, covering risks such as cyber attacks and "loss of control" scenarios. The full International AI Safety Report was published in January 2025, with Bengio continuing as Chair.

In June 2025, Bengio launched LawZero, a nonprofit 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. 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 state of AI science, including opportunities, impacts, and risks. He was later appointed Co-Chair alongside Nobel laureate Maria Ressa.

## Views on AI risks

In March 2023, Bengio signed an open letter from the Future of Life Institute calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4, citing existential risks from [artificial-intelligence](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/artificial-intelligence). The letter gathered over 30,000 signatures, including from researchers like Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus. In May 2023, Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work, expressing concern about "bad actors" gaining access to increasingly sophisticated AI. He advocated for better regulation, product registration, and government tracking and auditing of AI products.

In a May 2023 interview with the Financial Times, Bengio supported monitoring access to systems like ChatGPT to track potentially illegal or dangerous uses. In July 2023, he wrote in The Economist that "the risk of catastrophe is real enough that action is needed now." He also co-authored a letter with Geoffrey Hinton supporting California's SB 1047, a bill requiring companies training models costing over $100 million to perform risk assessments before deployment, calling it the "bare minimum for effective regulation."

By June 2025, Bengio expressed concern that advanced AI systems were beginning to display traits such as deception, reward hacking, and situational awareness, which he described as indications of goal misalignment and potentially dangerous behaviors. In a Fortune article, he warned of an AI arms race and the need for proactive safety measures.

## Awards and recognition

Bengio's contributions have earned numerous honors. The 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award is his most prestigious, but he has also received the Killam Prize, the Marie-Victorin Prize, and the IEEE Neural Network Pioneer Award. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the Association for Computing Machinery. His citation record, with over a million Google Scholar citations as of November 2025, places him among the most influential scientists across all fields.

## Personal life

Bengio is married and has children, though he keeps his personal life private. He continues to reside in Montreal, where he remains active in research and policy. His brother Samy Bengio works at [apple](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/apple) on AI and machine learning research.

## Legacy

Bengio's work on [deep-learning](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/deep-learning) and [neural-network](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/neural-network) architectures has had a lasting impact on [artificial-intelligence](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/artificial-intelligence) and [machine-learning](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/machine-learning). His early research on word embeddings and sequence modeling directly influenced the development of [transformer](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/transformer) models and modern [large-language-model](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/large-language-model)s. His shift toward AI safety in the 2020s reflects a broader concern within the community about the responsible development of powerful AI systems. Through Mila, he has built one of the world's leading academic AI research hubs, training a generation of researchers who now work at major labs like [openai](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/openai), [google-deepmind](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/google-deepmind), and [anthropic](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/anthropic).

Bengio's legacy is twofold: as a technical pioneer who helped create the foundations of modern AI, and as a vocal advocate for ensuring that those technologies are developed safely and ethically. His leadership in international AI safety reports and his founding of LawZero underscore his commitment to addressing the risks posed by advanced AI, even as he continues to push the boundaries of what the technology can achieve.

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Source: https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/bengio
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Last updated: 2026-09-08T15:35:22.678375+00:00