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 is widely recognized as one of the "Godfathers of AI" alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, with whom he shared the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award for foundational contributions to deep learning.
Bengio is the most-cited computer scientist globally by both total citations and h-index, and as of November 2025 became the first AI researcher to exceed one 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, a Master of Science in computer science, and a PhD in computer science, all from McGill University. His brother, Samy Bengio, is also a prominent computer scientist specializing in neural networks and serves as senior director of AI and ML research at Apple.
During their childhood, the Bengio 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 held postdoctoral positions at MIT under Michael I. Jordan and at AT&T Bell Labs. He joined the Université de Montréal as a faculty member in 1993 and has remained there since. He also co-directs the Learning in Machines & Brains program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research.
Bengio's early work introduced the neural probabilistic language model, which learned distributed representations (word embeddings) for words to address the "curse of dimensionality" in natural language processing. This research laid groundwork for modern large language models. His contributions to neural networks and machine learning have been instrumental in advancing the field.
In October 2016, Bengio co-founded Element AI, a Montreal-based AI incubator that commercialized AI research. The company was acquired by ServiceNow 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 several notable AI researchers, including Ian Goodfellow, Hugo Larochelle, and David Krueger.
AI Safety and Policy
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 report, published in January 2025 as the International AI Safety Report, continues under Bengio's chairmanship.
In June 2025, Bengio launched LawZero, a nonprofit focused on building "honest" AI systems that can 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. 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 40-expert group tasked with preparing a report on AI's opportunities, impacts, and risks. He later became Co-Chair alongside Nobel laureate Maria Ressa.
Views on AI
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. The letter, signed by over 30,000 individuals including Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus, highlighted existential risks from generative AI. 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 regulation, product registration, and government oversight.
Speaking to the Financial Times in May 2023, Bengio supported monitoring access to AI systems like ChatGPT to track 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 supporting California's SB 1047, which would require risk assessments for AI models costing over $100 million to train, calling it the "bare minimum for effective regulation."
In June 2025, Bengio expressed concern that advanced AI systems were beginning to show traits such as deception, reward hacking, and situational awareness, which he described as indications of goal misalignment and potentially dangerous behaviors. He has warned about the AI arms race and the need for proactive safety measures.