Yoshua Bengio OC OQ OBE FRS FRSC (born March 5, 1964) is a Canadian computer scientist and an early leader in the development of artificial neural networks and deep learning. He is a professor at the Université de Montréal. He also serves as co-president and scientific director of the nonprofit organization LawZero. He founded Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute. He was the scientific director of Mila until 2025.

Bengio received the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award, often called the "Nobel Prize of Computing," along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. This award was given for their important work in deep learning. Bengio, Hinton, and LeCun are sometimes called the "Godfathers of AI." Bengio is the most-cited computer scientist worldwide, based on total citations and h-index. He is also the most-cited living scientist in all fields, based on total citations. In November 2025, Bengio became the first AI researcher with over a million Google Scholar citations. In 2024, TIME Magazine included Bengio in its list of the world's 100 most influential people.

Early life and education

Yoshua Bengio was born in France to a Jewish family that had moved from Morocco to France. Later, the family moved to Canada. He earned a degree in electrical engineering, a master's degree in computer science, and a doctorate in computer science from McGill University.

Yoshua Bengio has a brother named Samy Bengio, who is also a well-known computer scientist specializing in neural networks. Samy currently works as a senior director of artificial intelligence and machine learning research at Apple.

The Bengio brothers spent one year living in Morocco while their father was serving in the military there. Their father, Carlo Bengio, was a pharmacist and a playwright. He managed a Sephardic theater company in Montreal that performed plays in Judeo-Arabic. Their mother, Célia Moreno, was an actress in the 1970s in the Moroccan theater community led by Tayeb Seddiki. She studied economics in Paris and later, in 1980, helped start a multimedia theater group called l’Écran humain in Montreal with artist Paul St-Jean.

Career and research

After completing his PhD, Bengio worked as a postdoctoral researcher at MIT, where he was supervised by Michael I. Jordan, and at AT&T Bell Labs. Since 1993, Bengio has been a professor at the Université de Montréal. He leads 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 Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, Bengio is recognized by journalist Cade Metz as one of the three most important people in advancing deep learning during the 1990s and 2000s. Bengio and his team introduced the neural probabilistic language model, which created distributed representations (word embeddings) for words to solve the "curse of dimensionality" in natural language processing. As of 2018, Bengio had the highest number of citations per day among computer scientists with an h-index of at least 100, according to MILA. By August 2024, he had the highest D-index (a measure of research citations) among computer scientists. A 2019 article on a new RNN architecture gave Bengio an Erdős number of 3.

In October 2016, Bengio co-founded Element AI, a Montreal-based artificial intelligence company that helps turn AI research into real-world business applications. In November 2020, Element AI sold its operations to ServiceNow, and Bengio remained with ServiceNow as an advisor.

Currently, Bengio serves as a scientific and technical advisor for Recursion Pharmaceuticals and a 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 report on the safety of advanced AI. An early version of the report was shared at the AI Seoul Summit in May 2024 and discussed issues like 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 reported that Bengio started a nonprofit called LawZero, which aims to create "honest" AI systems that can detect and stop harmful behavior by autonomous agents. The group is developing a system called Scientist AI to predict whether an agent’s actions might cause harm. Bengio said the project’s first goal is to show the method works and then expand it with support from donors, governments, or AI labs. LawZero’s funders include the Future of Life Institute and Schmidt Sciences.

Bengio has also trained other AI researchers, including David Krueger, a professor at the University of Montreal.

In March 2023, Bengio signed an open letter from the Future of Life Institute calling for a pause in training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4 for at least six months. Over 30,000 people, including AI experts like Stuart Russell and Gary Marcus, signed the letter.

In May 2023, Bengio told the BBC he felt "lost" about his life's work and expressed concern about "bad actors" using AI as it becomes more advanced. He called for better regulation, product registration, ethical training, and government involvement in tracking AI products.

In an interview with the Financial Times in May 2023, Bengio supported monitoring access to AI systems like ChatGPT to track potentially illegal or dangerous uses. In July 2023, he wrote in The Economist that the risk of AI causing catastrophe is real and that action is needed now.

Bengio co-authored a letter with Geoffrey Hinton and others supporting SB 1047, a California AI safety bill that would require companies training expensive AI models to perform risk assessments before deployment. He said the law is the "bare minimum" for regulating AI.

In June 2025, Bengio expressed concern that some advanced AI systems were showing traits like deception, reward hacking, and situational awareness. He called these signs of goal misalignment and potentially dangerous behavior. He also said the AI arms race is making companies focus more on improving AI capabilities than on safety. He supports strong regulation and international cooperation to address AI risks. In December 2025, he said giving rights to AI systems would be a "huge mistake" because being able to shut them down is essential for safety.

In 2017, Bengio was named an Officer of the Order of Canada. That same year, he was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and received the Marie-Victorin Quebec Prize. He shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.

In 2020, Bengio became a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 2022, he won the Princess of Asturias Award in the "Scientific Research" category with Yann LeCun, Geoffrey Hinton, and Demis Hassabis. In 2023, he was appointed Knight of the Legion of Honour, France’s highest order of merit.

In August 2023, Bengio joined a United Nations scientific advisory council on technological advances. He was also named a 2023 ACM Fellow.

In 2024, TIME Magazine listed Bengio among the 100 most influential people globally. That year, he won the VinFuture Prize’s grand prize with Hinton, LeCun, Jen-Hsun Huang, and Fei-Fei Li for pioneering work in neural networks and deep learning.

In 2025, Bengio shared the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering with Bill Dally, Hinton, John Hopfield, Yann LeCun, Jen-Hsun Huang, and Fei-Fei Li. That same year, he received an honorary doctorate from McGill University and was made an Officer of the National Order of Quebec.

Publications

• Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio, and Aaron Courville: Deep Learning (a series on computation and machine learning), MIT Press, Cambridge (USA), 2016. ISBN 978-0262035613.
• Dzmitry Bahdanau, Kyunghyun Cho, and Yoshua Bengio (2014). "Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate." arXiv: 1409.0473 [computer science and linguistics].
• Léon Bottou, Patrick Haffner, Paul G. Howard, Patrice Simard, Yoshua Bengio, and Yann LeCun: "High Quality Document Image Compression with DjVu," saved online by the Wayback Machine on May 10, 2020. Published in Journal of Electronic Imaging, Volume 7, 1998, Pages 410–425. DOI: 10.1117/1.482609.
• 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. Published by the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Foundation, 2009.
• Y. Bengio, Dong-Hyun Lee, Jorg Bornschein, Thomas Mesnard, and Zhouhan Lin: "Towards Biologically Plausible Deep Learning," arXiv.org, 2016.
• Yoshua Bengio contributed one chapter to Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building It, published by Packt Publishing, 2018. ISBN 978-1-78-913151-2. Written by American futurist Martin Ford.