Yoshua Bengio
Yoshua Bengio is LawZero's co-president and scientific director, a Université de Montréal professor, and Mila's founder and scientific advisor. His Montreal laboratory grew from work he began in 1993 after his McGill education. With colleagues, he helped develop neural language models and attention-based translation. He also coauthored the Deep Learning textbook with Ian Goodfellow and Aaron Courville. He shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. Bengio dates his shift toward reducing catastrophic AI risks to 2023. He announced LawZero in June 2025, with Scientist AI as a proposed approach to understanding and checking actions. He chairs the International AI Safety Report.
- Now at
- Université de Montréal, Mila and LawZero
- Works
- 1,570
- Citations
- 527,773
- h-index
- 187
Publication numbers from OpenAlex, as of 14 October 2026.
Timeline
-
1986–1993
A lab in Montreal
After his McGill education, he starts the Montreal laboratory that later becomes Mila.
-
2003
Words become learned representations
He and colleagues publish a neural language model with learned word representations.
-
2014–2015
Translation learns where to look
With Dzmitry Bahdanau and Kyunghyun Cho, he develops attention-based translation research.
-
2018 award
Recognition for a shared research path
He shares the Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.
-
June 2025
Starting LawZero
He announces LawZero and its proposed Scientist AI research approach.
Sources and credits
Photo: Xuthoria. License: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source: commons.wikimedia.org. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.
- McGill: notable alumni
- Mila: institutional history
- A Neural Probabilistic Language Model, 2003
- Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate
- Deep Learning: authors' textbook site
- Mila: Yoshua Bengio current profile
- Introducing LawZero, 3 June 2025
- LawZero: Yoshua Bengio current biography
- International AI Safety Report 2026