Yoshua Bengio’s main project right now is a system with no goals. No agency, no actions it takes on its own, no attempt to accomplish anything. It models the world and tells you the odds, and that’s the whole design. He calls it Scientist AI.
That’s an unusual thing to be building if you’re one of the three people who made modern deep learning work in the first place.
Who they are
Bengio is a professor of computer science at the Université de Montréal and the founder of Mila, the Quebec AI institute. He was born in Paris in 1964, did all three of his degrees at McGill, and spent the 1990s and 2000s on neural networks during the long stretch when almost nobody thought they’d amount to much. He shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for that work. Ian Goodfellow, who invented GANs, was his student.
By total citations he’s the most-cited computer scientist in the world, and the most-cited living scientist in any field. In June 2025 he started LawZero, a nonprofit AI safety lab that runs out of Mila with a staff of around 30.
Why they matter
He chairs the International AI Safety Report, which is the closest thing the field has to a shared scientific baseline. It came out of the 2023 Bletchley summit, and the 2026 edition drew panel nominations from more than 30 countries plus the UN, the OECD, and the EU, with over 100 contributing experts.
His argument isn’t that AI is too smart. It’s that agency is the dangerous part, and that a system which predicts without pursuing anything can be both useful and safe by construction. Most of the industry is building the opposite thing, on purpose, right now.
The reports he chairs keep landing on the same finding: safety work isn’t keeping up with capability. Coming from the person who ran the panel, and who has the citation record he has, that’s harder to wave off than the usual warnings.
What they’ve said or done
On his own site, explaining why he started LawZero, Bengio writes that once he understood how dangerous the current agency-driven direction could be for future generations, he knew he had to do what he could.
He was 61 when he founded it. He’d already won the award, built the institute, trained the students. Starting a nonprofit to argue against the field’s main design choice is not the obvious next move for someone in that position.