Yoshua Bengio
In plain wordsA Canadian computer scientist who helped found deep learning, including ideas behind today's language models, and who has become a leading voice on the risks of advanced AI.
Paris-born Canadian computer scientist, professor at the Université de Montréal since 1993 and founder of MilaMila, prop. n.: Montreal's deep-learning hub, where professors and students from several Quebec universities work side by side. It grew from the lab Yoshua Bengio started in 1993 and is among the world's largest academic AI centers., the Quebec AI institute, which he directed until 2025. His 1994 analysis with Patrice Simard and Paolo Frasconi showed why gradients vanish in recurrent networksrecurrent neural network, n.: A neural network that reads a sequence, such as a sentence or an audio clip, one piece at a time, carrying a running summary forward so that what came earlier can shape how later pieces are understood. (see vanishing gradient problemvanishing gradient problem, n.: A training difficulty in deep or recurrent networks: the learning signal shrinks as it travels back through many layers or time steps, so the early parts of the network barely learn.); his neural probabilistic language model (2000–2003) learned word embeddingsword embedding, n.: A list of numbers standing for a word, learned so that words used in similar ways get similar lists. It lets a computer measure that 'cat' is closer to 'dog' than to 'car'. jointly with a neural language modellanguage model, n.: A system that has learned how likely different sequences of words are, so it can predict the next word in a text and, by doing that repeatedly, write text of its own.; and his group produced the attentionattention, n.: A way for an AI model to choose what to focus on. For each word it processes, the model scores how relevant every other word is and draws information mostly from the relevant ones. mechanism for translation (Dzmitry Bahdanau, Kyunghyun Cho and Bengio, 2014) and generative adversarial networksgenerative adversarial network, n.: Two neural networks trained as rivals: one forges fake images, the other tries to spot the fakes. As both improve, the forger's output becomes realistic enough to fool people. (with Ian GoodfellowIan Goodfellow, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who invented generative adversarial networks, in which two neural networks compete to produce realistic fake images, and who pioneered research on fooling AI systems., 2014). He co-wrote the textbook 'Deep Learning' (2016). Since 2023 he has concentrated on AI safety: he chairs the International AI Safety ReportInternational AI Safety Report, prop. n.: A large scientific review, led by the computer scientist Yoshua Bengio and backed by more than 30 countries, summing up what is known about what advanced AI can do and how it could go wrong. and in June 2025 launched LawZero, a nonprofit developing non-agentic 'Scientist AI' as a safeguard against harmful AI agents. Turing AwardTuring Award, prop. n.: Nicknamed the 'Nobel Prize of computing', the top honor in computer science, awarded each year since 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery. Several AI pioneers have received it. 2018 (with Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey Hinton, prop. n.: A British-Canadian scientist whose decades of persistent work on brain-inspired neural networks laid the foundations of modern AI; often called a 'godfather of AI', he now warns publicly about its dangers. and Yann LeCunYann LeCun, prop. n.: A French-American computer scientist who pioneered the neural networks that recognize images, led Meta's AI research for over a decade, and argues that chatbots alone will not reach human-level AI.); Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering 2025.
Related
- deep learningdeep learning, n.: Machine learning done with neural networks built from many stacked layers: raw data such as pixels, sound or text goes in at one end, and each layer turns what it receives into something more abstract.
- godfathers of AIgodfathers of AI, phr.: A media nickname for three scientists — Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun — whose decades of work on neural networks underpins modern AI. They shared computing's top prize in 2019.
- attentionattention, n.: A way for an AI model to choose what to focus on. For each word it processes, the model scores how relevant every other word is and draws information mostly from the relevant ones.
- generative adversarial networkgenerative adversarial network, n.: Two neural networks trained as rivals: one forges fake images, the other tries to spot the fakes. As both improve, the forger's output becomes realistic enough to fool people.
- International AI Safety ReportInternational AI Safety Report, prop. n.: A large scientific review, led by the computer scientist Yoshua Bengio and backed by more than 30 countries, summing up what is known about what advanced AI can do and how it could go wrong.
- word embeddingword embedding, n.: A list of numbers standing for a word, learned so that words used in similar ways get similar lists. It lets a computer measure that 'cat' is closer to 'dog' than to 'car'.
- AI safetyAI safety, n.: The effort to keep AI from doing serious harm, whether because it pursues aims its makers never intended, is turned to bad uses or simply malfunctions — a concern that grows as systems become more capable.
Sources
- Bengio, Y., Ducharme, R., Vincent, P. & Jauvin, C. (2003). A Neural Probabilistic Language Model. Journal of Machine Learning Research 3: 1137–1155.
- Goodfellow, I., Bengio, Y. & Courville, A. (2016). Deep Learning. MIT Press.
Mentioned in
Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey Hinton, prop. n.: A British-Canadian scientist whose decades of persistent work on brain-inspired neural networks laid the foundations of modern AI; often called a 'godfather of AI', he now warns publicly about its dangers., Yann LeCunYann LeCun, prop. n.: A French-American computer scientist who pioneered the neural networks that recognize images, led Meta's AI research for over a decade, and argues that chatbots alone will not reach human-level AI., godfathers of AIgodfathers of AI, phr.: A media nickname for three scientists — Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun — whose decades of work on neural networks underpins modern AI. They shared computing's top prize in 2019., Ian GoodfellowIan Goodfellow, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who invented generative adversarial networks, in which two neural networks compete to produce realistic fake images, and who pioneered research on fooling AI systems., ICLRICLR, prop. n.: A major deep-learning conference, held every spring since 2013, where the reviews of each submitted paper are posted online for anyone to read., Independent International Scientific Panel on AIIndependent International Scientific Panel on AI, prop. n.: A group of 40 independent experts set up by the United Nations in 2025 to give every country a shared, science-based picture of what AI can do, its risks and its benefits., International AI Safety ReportInternational AI Safety Report, prop. n.: A large scientific review, led by the computer scientist Yoshua Bengio and backed by more than 30 countries, summing up what is known about what advanced AI can do and how it could go wrong., LeNetLeNet, prop. n.: A family of early image-recognition neural networks built at Bell Labs from 1989 that learned to read handwritten digits. A version read huge numbers of bank checks, and its design underlies today's image models., MilaMila, prop. n.: Montreal's deep-learning hub, where professors and students from several Quebec universities work side by side. It grew from the lab Yoshua Bengio started in 1993 and is among the world's largest academic AI centers., Pause Giant AI ExperimentsPause Giant AI Experiments, prop. n.: A 2023 open letter, signed by tens of thousands of people including prominent technologists, that asked AI labs to halt the training of any AI more capable than GPT-4 for at least half a year., Statement on AI RiskStatement on AI Risk, prop. n.: A one-sentence public statement from May 2023, signed by hundreds of leading AI scientists and company heads, declaring that guarding against the chance of AI wiping out humanity should rank as a priority for the whole world., Turing AwardTuring Award, prop. n.: Nicknamed the 'Nobel Prize of computing', the top honor in computer science, awarded each year since 1966 by the Association for Computing Machinery. Several AI pioneers have received it., Dzmitry BahdanauDzmitry Bahdanau, prop. n.: A Belarusian computer scientist who, as a student in Yoshua Bengio's lab in 2014, was lead author of the paper that introduced attention, the mechanism later at the core of the transformer., guaranteed safe AIguaranteed safe AI, n.: A proposed approach to AI safety in which systems come with mathematical proofs or checkable guarantees that they will not cause certain harms, instead of relying on testing alone., Kyunghyun ChoKyunghyun Cho, prop. n.: A South Korean computer scientist who co-invented the encoder–decoder approach to neural machine translation and the gated recurrent unit, and co-wrote the paper that introduced attention., TheanoTheano, prop. n.: One of the first popular free software tools for deep learning, built at a Montreal university lab; development ended in 2017, but it shaped the toolkits that replaced it.