Short answers, pulled from the story.
Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist born on the 5th of March 1964, known as 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. He founded Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, and served as its scientific director until 2025.
Yoshua Bengio received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize of Computing, together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their foundational work on deep learning. The three are sometimes called the Godfathers of AI.
In November 2025, Yoshua Bengio became the first AI researcher to pass one million citations on Google Scholar. He is the most-cited computer scientist in the world by both total citations and h-index, and the most-cited living scientist across all fields by total citations.
LawZero is a nonprofit that Yoshua Bengio launched in June 2025 to build honest AI systems that can detect and block harmful behavior by autonomous agents. It is developing a system called Scientist AI, meant to act as a guardrail by predicting whether an agent's actions could cause harm. Its funders include the Future of Life Institute, Schmidt Sciences, the Gates Foundation, and the Canadian government.
Yoshua Bengio signed the Future of Life Institute's March 2023 open letter after AI researchers raised concerns about existential risk from artificial general intelligence. The letter called for all AI labs to pause training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least 6 months. It was eventually signed by more than 30,000 people, including Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus.
Yoshua Bengio's brother is Samy Bengio, also an influential computer scientist working with neural networks. Samy Bengio serves as senior director of AI and ML research at Apple.