# Yoshua Bengio
![[50 Resources/51 Attachments/51.03 Public/2026-05-04 Yoshua Bengio.jpg|400]]
Canadian computer scientist and one of the three "Godfathers of AI" alongside [[Geoffrey Hinton]] and [[Yann LeCun]]. Pioneered foundational work in [[Deep Learning]], particularly neural language models, attention mechanisms, and generative adversarial networks. Won the 2018 Turing Award (shared with Hinton and LeCun) and the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Hinton) for foundational discoveries enabling [[Machine Learning (ML)]] with [[Neural Networks (NNs)]].
Bengio is the founder and scientific director of Mila (Quebec AI Institute), the world's largest academic research center for [[Deep Learning]]. He is a professor at Université de Montréal and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Royal Society (UK), and the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR).
## Key Contributions
- **Neural probabilistic language models** (2003): showed neural networks could learn word representations, laying groundwork for modern [[Natural Language Processing (NLP)]] and [[Large Language Models (LLMs)]]
- **Attention mechanisms**: early work on attention for sequence-to-sequence models, a precursor to the [[Transformers]] architecture
- **Generative Adversarial Networks**: co-developed foundational theory with Ian Goodfellow (his PhD student) and Aaron Courville
- **Curriculum learning**: training models on progressively harder examples
- **Deep Learning textbook** (2016): co-authored with Ian Goodfellow and Aaron Courville, the field's standard reference
## Stance on AI Safety
Bengio is one of the most prominent voices advocating for [[AI Safety]] and responsible AI governance. He signed the 2023 "Statement on AI Risk" and has publicly called for international regulation and a pause on frontier model development until safety measures improve.
## Quotes
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## Books
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## References
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshua_Bengio
- https://yoshuabengio.org
- https://mila.quebec
## Related
- [[Geoffrey Hinton]]
- [[Yann LeCun]]
- [[Deep Learning]]
- [[Machine Learning (ML)]]
- [[Neural Networks (NNs)]]
- [[Natural Language Processing (NLP)]]
- [[AI Safety]]
- [[Artificial Intelligence (AI)]]
- [[Transformers]]
- [[Large Language Models (LLMs)]]