Yoshua Bengio
Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist, one of the pioneers of deep learning, and a recipient of the 2018 Turing Award alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. He has become an increasingly vocal advocate for AI safety research.
Career
Deep Learning Research
Bengio's research contributions include foundational work on neural network language models, attention mechanisms, and generative adversarial networks. His work helped establish deep learning as a dominant paradigm in AI.
Mila
Bengio founded and leads Mila (Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute), one of the world's largest academic research centers dedicated to machine learning. The institute has produced influential research and trained many prominent AI researchers.
AI Safety Advocacy
In recent years, Bengio has become increasingly concerned about risks from advanced AI systems. He has:
- Signed open letters calling for AI safety research prioritization
- Advocated for international governance of AI development
- Called for mandatory safety evaluations before deploying powerful AI
- Testified before government bodies on AI risks
Views on AI Risk
Bengio has expressed concern that competitive pressures may lead to insufficient safety measures in AI development. He advocates for:
- Slowing development of the most powerful AI systems
- International cooperation on AI governance
- More research into AI alignment and control
- Transparency requirements for frontier AI labs