Yoshua Bengio

One of the 'godfathers of deep learning', Bengio pivoted from pure research advocacy to AI safety alarm after 2023. His signature on the one-sentence extinction risk letter brought credibility to existential AI risk debates and helped shift EU AI Act negotiations toward frontier model risks.

Yoshua Bengio was born on March 5, 1964, in Paris, and grew up in Montreal. A professor at the Université de Montréal and scientific director of Mila (Quebec AI Institute), he won the 2018 Turing Award alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their work on deep learning. Unlike LeCun, who remains sceptical of AI doom scenarios, Bengio has become increasingly vocal about catastrophic AI risk.