Yoshua Bengio (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian-French

computer scientist A computer scientist is a scientist who specializes in the academic study of computer science. Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation. Although computer scientists can also focus their work and research on ...

, and a pioneer of

artificial neural networks In machine learning, a neural network (also artificial neural network or neural net, abbreviated ANN or NN) is a computational model inspired by the structure and functions of biological neural networks. A neural network consists of connected ...

and

deep learning Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience a ...

. He is a professor at the

Université de Montréal The Université de Montréal (; UdeM; ) is a French-language public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. The university's main campus is located in the Côte-des-Neiges neighborhood of Côte-des-Neiges–Notre-Dame-de-Grâce on M ...

and scientific director of the AI institute MILA. Bengio received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, often referred to as the " Nobel Prize of Computing", together with

Geoffrey Hinton Geoffrey Everest Hinton (born 1947) is a British-Canadian computer scientist, cognitive scientist, and cognitive psychologist known for his work on artificial neural networks, which earned him the title "the Godfather of AI". Hinton is Univer ...

and

Yann LeCun Yann André Le Cun ( , ; usually spelled LeCun; born 8 July 1960) is a French-American computer scientist working primarily in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, mobile robotics and computational neuroscience. He is the Silver Pr ...

, for their foundational work on deep learning. Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun are sometimes referred to as the "Godfathers of AI". Bengio is the most-cited computer scientist globally (by both total citations and by ''h''-index), and the most-cited living scientist across all fields (by total citations). In 2024, ''TIME'' Magazine included Bengio in its yearly list of the world's 100 most influential people.

Early life and education

Bengio was born in

France France, officially the French Republic, is a country located primarily in Western Europe. Overseas France, Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the Atlantic Ocean#North Atlan ...

to a

Jewish Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...

family who had emigrated to France from Morocco. The family then relocated to Canada. He received his

Bachelor of Science A Bachelor of Science (BS, BSc, B.S., B.Sc., SB, or ScB; from the Latin ') is a bachelor's degree that is awarded for programs that generally last three to five years. The first university to admit a student to the degree of Bachelor of Scienc ...

degree (electrical engineering), MSc (computer science) and

PhD A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

(computer science) from

McGill University McGill University (French: Université McGill) is an English-language public research university in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Founded in 1821 by royal charter,Frost, Stanley Brice. ''McGill University, Vol. I. For the Advancement of Learning, ...

. Bengio is the brother of Samy Bengio, also an influential computer scientist working with neural networks, who is currently Senior Director of AI and ML Research at

Apple An apple is a round, edible fruit produced by an apple tree (''Malus'' spp.). Fruit trees of the orchard or domestic apple (''Malus domestica''), the most widely grown in the genus, are agriculture, cultivated worldwide. The tree originated ...

. The Bengio brothers lived in Morocco for a year during their father's military service there. His father, Carlo Bengio was a pharmacist and a playwright; he ran a Sephardic theater company in Montreal that performed pieces in

Judeo-Arabic Judeo-Arabic (; ; ) sometimes referred as Sharh, are a group of different ethnolects within the branches of the Arabic language used by jewish communities. Although Jewish use of Arabic, which predates Islam, has been in some ways distinct ...

. His mother, Célia Moreno, was an actor in the 1970s in the Moroccan theater scene led by Tayeb Seddiki. She studied economics in Paris, and then in Montreal in 1980 she co-founded with artist Paul St-Jean l’''Écran humain'', a multimedia theater troupe.

Career and research

After his PhD, Bengio was a

postdoctoral A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). Postdocs most commonly, but not always, have a temporary acade ...

fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

(supervised by Michael I. Jordan) and AT&T Bell Labs. Bengio has been a faculty member at the

since 1993, heads the MILA ( Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms) and is co-director of the Learning in Machines & Brains program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Along with

and

, Bengio is considered by journalist Cade Metz to be one of the three people most responsible for the advancement of deep learning during the 1990s and 2000s. Among the computer scientists with an

h-index The ''h''-index is an author-level metric that measures both the productivity and citation impact of the publications, initially used for an individual scientist or scholar. The ''h''-index correlates with success indicators such as winning t ...

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, a measure of the research citations a scientist has received) of any computer scientist. Thanks to a 2019 article on a novel RNN architecture, Bengio has an

Erdős number The Erdős number () describes the "collaborative distance" between mathematician Paul Erdős and another person, as measured by authorship of mathematical papers. The same principle has been applied in other fields where a particular individual ...

of 3. In October 2016, Bengio co-founded Element AI, a

Montreal Montreal is the List of towns in Quebec, largest city in the Provinces and territories of Canada, province of Quebec, the List of the largest municipalities in Canada by population, second-largest in Canada, and the List of North American cit ...

-based

artificial intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

incubator that turns AI research into real-world business applications. The company sold its operations to ServiceNow in November 2020, with Bengio remaining at ServiceNow as an advisor. Bengio currently serves as scientific and technical advisor for Recursion Pharmaceuticals and scientific advisor for Valence Discovery. ICLR 2025 - Yoshua Bengio 04

At the first AI Safety Summit in November 2023, British Prime Minister

Rishi Sunak Rishi Sunak (born 12 May 1980) is a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party (UK), Leader of the Conservative Party from 2022 to 2024. Following his defeat to Keir Starmer's La ...

announced that Bengio would lead an international scientific report on the safety of advanced AI. An interim version of the report was delivered at the AI Seoul Summit in May 2024, and covered issues such as the potential for cyber attacks and 'loss of control' scenarios. The full report was published in January 2025 as the International AI Safety Report. In June 2025, ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...

'' reported that Bengio had 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 told the paper 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 and Schmidt Sciences.

Views on AI

In March 2023, following concerns raised by AI experts about the

existential risk from artificial general intelligence Existential risk from artificial intelligence refers to the idea that substantial progress in artificial general intelligence (AGI) could lead to human extinction or an irreversible global catastrophe. One argument for the importance of this r ...

, Bengio signed an

open letter An open letter is a Letter (message), letter that is intended to be read by a wide audience, or a letter intended for an individual, but that is nonetheless widely distributed intentionally. Open letters usually take the form of a letter (mess ...

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 Generative Pre-trained Transformer 4 (GPT-4) is a multimodal large language model trained and created by OpenAI and the fourth in its series of GPT foundation models. It was launched on March 14, 2023, and made publicly available via the p ...

". The letter has been signed by over 30,000 individuals, including AI researchers such as Stuart Russell and

Gary Marcus Gary Fred Marcus (born 1970) is an American psychologist, cognitive scientist, and author, known for his research on the intersection of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence (AI). Marcus is professor ''emeritus'' of ps ...

. In May 2023, Bengio stated in an interview to ''BBC'' that he felt "lost" over his life's work. He raised his concern about "bad actors" getting hold of AI, especially as it becomes more sophisticated and powerful. He called for better regulation, product registration, ethical training, and more involvement from governments in tracking and auditing AI products. Speaking with the ''

Financial Times The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and also published digitally that focuses on business and economic Current affairs (news format), current affairs. Based in London, the paper is owned by a Jap ...

'' in May 2023, Bengio said that he supported the monitoring of access to AI systems such as

ChatGPT ChatGPT is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and released on November 30, 2022. It uses large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4o as well as other Multimodal learning, multimodal models to create human-like re ...

so that potentially illegal or dangerous uses could be tracked. In July 2023, he published a piece in ''

The Economist ''The Economist'' is a British newspaper published weekly in printed magazine format and daily on Electronic publishing, digital platforms. It publishes stories on topics that include economics, business, geopolitics, technology and culture. M ...

'' arguing that "the risk of catastrophe is real enough that action is needed now." Bengio co-authored a letter with

and others in support of SB 1047, a California AI safety bill that would require companies training models which cost 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 Specification gaming or reward hacking occurs when anArtificial intelligence , AI trained with reinforcement learning optimizes an objective function—achieving the literal, formal specification of an objective—without actually achieving an out ...

, and

situational awareness Situational awareness or situation awareness, often abbreviated as SA is the understanding of an environment, its elements, and how it changes with respect to time or other factors. It is also defined as the perception of the elements in the envi ...

. He described these as indications of goal misalignment and potentially dangerous behaviors. In a ''Fortune'' article, he stated that the AI arms race was encouraging companies to prioritize capability improvements over safety research. He has also voiced support for strong regulation and international collaboration to address risks posed by advanced AI systems.

Awards and honours

In 2017, Bengio was named an

Officer of the Order of Canada The Order of Canada () is a Canadian national order and the second-highest honour for merit in the system of orders, decorations, and medals of Canada, after the Order of Merit. To coincide with the centennial of Canadian Confederation, the ...

. The same year, he was nominated

Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) is an award granted to individuals that the Royal Society of Canada judges to have "made remarkable contributions in the arts, the humanities and the sciences, as well as in Canadian public life" ...

and received the Marie-Victorin Quebec Prize. Together with

and

, Bengio won the 2018

Turing Award The ACM A. M. Turing Award is an annual prize given by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for contributions of lasting and major technical importance to computer science. It is generally recognized as the highest distinction in the fi ...

. In 2020, he was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the Fellows of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, incl ...

. In 2022, he received the Princess of Asturias Award in the category "Scientific Research" with his peers

and

Demis Hassabis Sir Demis Hassabis (born 27 July 1976) is a British artificial intelligence (AI) researcher, and entrepreneur. He is the chief executive officer and co-founder of Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs, and a UK Government AI Adviser. In 2024, Ha ...

. In 2023, Bengio was appointed Knight of the

Legion of Honour The National Order of the Legion of Honour ( ), formerly the Imperial Order of the Legion of Honour (), is the highest and most prestigious French national order of merit, both military and Civil society, civil. Currently consisting of five cl ...

, France's highest order of merit. In August 2023, he was appointed to a

United Nations The United Nations (UN) is the Earth, global intergovernmental organization established by the signing of the Charter of the United Nations, UN Charter on 26 June 1945 with the stated purpose of maintaining international peace and internationa ...

scientific advisory council on technological advances. He was recognized as a 2023 ACM Fellow. In 2024, ''TIME'' Magazine included Bengio in its yearly list of the 100 most influential people globally. In the same year, he was awarded VinFuture Prize's grand prize along with Geoffrey E. Hinton,

, Jen-Hsun Huang and Fei-Fei Li for pioneering advancements in

neural networks A neural network is a group of interconnected units called neurons that send signals to one another. Neurons can be either Cell (biology), biological cells or signal pathways. While individual neurons are simple, many of them together in a netwo ...

and

algorithms. In 2025 he was awarded the

Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Queen most commonly refers to: * Queen regnant, a female monarch of a kingdom * Queen consort, the wife of a reigning king * Queen (band), a British rock band Queen or QUEEN may also refer to: Monarchy * Queen dowager, the widow of a king * ...

jointly with Bill Dally, Geoffrey E. Hinton,

John Hopfield John Joseph Hopfield (born July 15, 1933) is an American physicist and emeritus professor of Princeton University, most widely known for his study of associative neural networks in 1982. He is known for the development of the Hopfield network. ...

, Jen-Hsun Huang and Fei-Fei Li. On May 30 2025, he was a recipient of

's Honorary Doctorate for his outstanding contributions to

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

and

Deep Learning Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience a ...

Publications

* Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville: ''Deep Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning)'', MIT Press, Cambridge (USA), 2016. . * * Léon Bottou, Patrick Haffner, Paul G. Howard, Patrice Simard, Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun
''High Quality Document Image Compression with DjVu''
In: ''Journal of Electronic Imaging'', Band 7, 1998, S. 410–425 * Bengio, Yoshua; Schuurmans, Dale; Lafferty, John; Williams, Chris K. I. and Culotta, Aron (eds.), ''Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22 (NIPS'22), December 7th–10th, 2009, Vancouver, BC'', Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Foundation, 2009 * Y. Bengio, Dong-Hyun Lee, Jorg Bornschein, Thomas Mesnard, Zhouhan Lin
''Towards Biologically Plausible Deep Learning''
arXiv.org, 2016 * Bengio contributed one chapter to ''Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it'', Packt Publishing, 2018, , by the American futurist Martin Ford.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bengio, Yoshua 1964 births Living people Canadian artificial intelligence researchers Canadian computer scientists Fellows of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2023 fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery French emigrants to Quebec French people of Moroccan-Jewish descent Canadian people of Moroccan-Jewish descent Canadian Sephardi Jews Machine learning researchers McGill University Faculty of Engineering alumni Academic staff of the Université de Montréal Turing Award laureates Jewish Canadian scientists 21st-century Mizrahi Jews Canadian fellows of the Royal Society Officers of the Order of Canada AI safety scientists