Yoshua Bengio: Architect of Deep Learning and AI Safety

In this episode of pplpod, we explore the career and conscience of Yoshua Bengio, the Canadian computer scientist celebrated as one of the three "Godfathers of AI" and the most-cited computer scientist in the world. We trace his journey from his education at McGill University and early days at Bell Labs to winning the Turing Award in 2018 for his foundational work on deep learning alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun,,.
We discuss Bengio’s massive contributions to the field—including the founding of Mila and Element AI—and his pivotal role in developing technologies like neural machine translation and attention models,. However, the conversation takes a critical turn as we examine why this pioneer recently admitted to feeling "lost" regarding his life's work.
Topics covered in this episode include:
The Pivot to Safety: Why Bengio signed the open letter calling for a pause on training systems more powerful than GPT-4 and his concerns about "loss of control" scenarios,.LawZero & "Honest" AI: His 2025 launch of a nonprofit aimed at creating guardrails and "scientist AI" to detect harmful behaviors in autonomous agents.Global Regulation: His work leading the International AI Safety Report for the UK government and his advisory roles with the UN and the California safety bill SB 1047,,.Roots & Family: His background born to a Moroccan-Jewish family in Paris and his connection to brother and fellow researcher Samy Bengio.Tune in to understand how the architect of modern AI became one of its most vocal critics, striving to ensure the technology remains safe for humanity.