Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist and a pioneer of artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Université de Montréal and co-president and scientific director of the nonprofit LawZero. Bengio founded Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, and served as its scientific director until 2025. 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 foundational work on 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 list of the world's 100 most influential people.
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 in computer engineering, his Master of Science in computer science, and his PhD in computer science, all from McGill University. His brother, Samy Bengio, is also an influential computer scientist specializing in neural networks and serves as senior director of AI and ML research at Apple. The brothers spent a year in Morocco during their father's military service. Their father, Carlo Bengio, was a pharmacist and playwright who ran a Sephardic theater company in Montreal performing in Judeo-Arabic. Their mother, Célia Moreno, was an actress in the 1970s Moroccan theater scene and later co-founded the multimedia theater troupe l'Écran humain in Montreal in 1980.
Career and Research
After completing his PhD, Bengio was a postdoctoral fellow at MIT 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. He heads Mila (formerly the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms) and co-directs the Learning in Machines & Brains program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Along with Hinton and LeCun, Bengio is credited by journalist Cade Metz as one of the three people most responsible for advancing deep learning in 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. As of 2018, among computer scientists with an h-index of at least 100, Bengio had the most recent citations per day, according to Mila. As of August 2024, he held the highest Discipline H-index (D-index) of any computer scientist. A 2019 article on a novel recurrent neural network architecture gave him an Erdős number of 3.
In October 2016, Bengio co-founded Element AI, a Montreal-based artificial intelligence incubator that turned AI research into business applications. ServiceNow acquired its operations in November 2020, and Bengio remained as an advisor. He also serves as scientific and technical advisor for Recursion Pharmaceuticals and scientific advisor for Valence Discovery.
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 issues such as cyber attacks and "loss of control" scenarios. The full report, published in January 2025 as the International AI Safety Report, continues under Bengio's chairmanship.
In June 2025, Bengio launched LawZero, a nonprofit organization aimed at building "honest" AI systems that detect and block harmful behavior by autonomous agents. The group develops a system called Scientist AI, intended to predict 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 preparing a report on AI's opportunities, impacts, and risks. He was later appointed Co-Chair alongside Nobel laureate Maria Ressa.
Bengio has trained many notable AI researchers, including David Krueger, Ian Goodfellow, and Hugo Larochelle.
Views on AI
In March 2023, 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, signed by over 30,000 individuals including Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus, reflected growing concerns about existential risk from artificial general intelligence.
In May 2023, Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" over his life's work, raising concerns about "bad actors" gaining access to increasingly sophisticated AI. He called for better regulation, product registration, ethical training, and government involvement in tracking and auditing AI products. In a Financial Times interview that month, he 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."
Bengio co-authored a letter with Geoffrey Hinton and others supporting SB 1047, a California AI safety bill requiring companies training models costing over $100 million to perform risk assessments before deployment. They called the legislation 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, describing them 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.
Awards and Honors
Bengio's accolades include the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, shared with Hinton and LeCun. He has also received numerous other honors, including being named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. His citation record places him among the most influential scientists in any field.
Legacy and Influence
Bengio's work on deep learning has shaped modern artificial intelligence, from natural language processing to computer vision. His neural probabilistic language model laid groundwork for later developments in word embeddings and sequence models. His leadership at Mila has made Montreal a global hub for AI research. His recent advocacy for AI safety reflects a shift from pure advancement to responsible development, influencing policy discussions worldwide.
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 public discourse on AI.
See Also
References
This article is based on information from public sources, including the Wikipedia article on Yoshua Bengio, as well as news reports and academic publications.