Yoshua Bengio
Co-President and Scientific Director, LawZero
Yoshua Bengio is a deep learning researcher whose work spans neural language models, representation learning, generative models, and attention. A professor at Université de Montréal and founder of Mila, he now focuses on reducing risks from advanced AI. He co-leads LawZero scientifically and chairs the International AI Safety Report, connecting technical safety research with an international assessment of evidence.
Get AI Secret’s free daily briefing, including Yoshua Bengio and the wider AI industry.
At a glance
Yoshua Bengio is a deep learning researcher whose work spans neural language models, representation learning, generative models, and attention. A professor at Université de Montréal and founder of Mila, he now focuses on reducing risks from advanced AI. He co-leads LawZero scientifically and chairs the International AI Safety Report, connecting technical safety research with an international assessment of evidence.
- Organizations
- LawZero; Université de Montréal
- Affiliation
- Mila founder and scientific advisor
- Recognition
- 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award
Sources checked . Selected career background and milestones.
Career, in context.
Selected research, leadership and career milestones, newest first.
Chairs the 2026 safety report
The second annual International AI Safety Report was published under Bengio’s chairmanship, continuing an international effort to assess general-purpose AI capabilities, risks, and possible mitigation techniques.
Source: International AI Safety Report ↗Launches LawZero
Bengio announced LawZero, a nonprofit devoted to safe-by-design AI research. Its Scientist AI direction emphasizes systems that understand and explain the world rather than pursue independent goals.
Source: LawZero ↗Leads first annual safety report
The inaugural International AI Safety Report brought together scientific evidence on general-purpose AI capabilities and risks under Bengio’s leadership, ahead of the Paris AI Action Summit.
Source: International AI Safety Report ↗Shares Turing Award recognition
ACM named Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Yann LeCun recipients of the 2018 Turing Award, recognizing foundational conceptual and engineering contributions to deep neural networks.
Source: Association for Computing Machinery ↗Co-authors neural translation attention
With Dzmitry Bahdanau and Kyunghyun Cho, Bengio presented a translation model that learns to align and translate jointly, introducing an influential attention-based approach.
Source: arXiv / paper authors ↗Co-authors GAN paper
Bengio was a co-author of the generative adversarial networks paper, which trains a generative model against a discriminative model in a competitive learning framework.
Source: arXiv / paper authors ↗Joins Université de Montréal
After postdoctoral research at MIT and AT&T Bell Labs, Bengio joined Université de Montréal, where he built a long-running research program in neural networks and learning.
Source: Yoshua Bengio / Québec government-hosted presentation ↗Earns McGill doctorate
Bengio completed his PhD in computer science at McGill University after an engineering bachelor’s degree and computer science master’s, before beginning postdoctoral research at MIT.
Source: Université de Montréal ↗
Show earlier historyHide earlier history
The latest on Yoshua Bengio
Newest firstReporting on this topic is coming soon. Explore our latest coverage.