Yoshua BengioYoshua Bengio

Born 1964 in Paris, France, into a Sephardic Jewish family that emigrated from Morocco to Canada. Brother Samy Bengio is also an AI researcher (now at Apple). Earned BS in Electrical Engineering, MS and PhD in Computer Science all from McGill University (PhD 1991, advisor: Renato De Mori). Postdoc at MIT with Michael I. Jordan and at AT&T Bell Labs. Joined Universite de Montreal as faculty in 1993 and has remained since. Founded MILA (Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms), now the world's largest academic deep learning lab. Introduced neural probabilistic language models (2003), attention mechanisms for machine translation (2014, with Bahdanau), and supervised Ian Goodfellow's invention of GANs (2014). Co-founded Element AI (2016, sold to ServiceNow 2020). Active in AI safety and governance. Shared the Turing Award (2018). Named Officer of the Order of Canada (2017). Since 2023 has pivoted almost entirely to AI safety: chaired the International AI Safety Report (2025), founded the non-profit LawZero (June 2025) to build non-agentic honest 'Scientist AI', and warns that frontier systems already show self-preservation, deception and blackmail behaviors.