Bengio was born in France to a Jewish family who had emigrated to France from Morocco. The family then relocated to Canada.[16] He received his Bachelor of Science degree (electrical engineering), MSc (computer science) and PhD (computer science) from McGill University.[2][17]
Bengio is the brother of Samy Bengio,[16] also an influential computer scientist working with neural networks, who is currently Senior Director of AI and ML Research at Apple.[18]
The Bengio brothers lived in Morocco for a year during their father's military service there.[16] His father, Carlo Bengio was a pharmacist and a playwright; he ran a Sephardic theater company in Montreal that performed pieces in Judeo-Arabic.[19][20] His mother, Célia Moreno, was an actor in the 1970s in the Moroccan theater scene led by Tayeb Seddiki. She studied economics in Paris, and then in Montreal in 1980 she co-founded with artist Paul St-Jean l’Écran humain, a multimedia theater troupe.[21]
Along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, Bengio is considered by journalist Cade Metz to be one of the three people most responsible for the advancement of deep learning during the 1990s and 2000s.[23] Among the computer scientists with an h-index of at least 100, Bengio was as of 2018 the one with the most recent citations per day, according to MILA.[24][25] As of August 2024, he has the highest Discipline H-index (D-index, a measure of the research citations a scientist has received) of any computer scientist.[26] Thanks to a 2019 article on a novel RNN architecture, Bengio has an Erdős number of 3.[27]
In October 2016, Bengio co-founded Element AI, a Montreal-based artificial intelligenceincubator that turns AI research into real-world business applications.[23] The company sold its operations to ServiceNow in November 2020,[28] with Bengio remaining at ServiceNow as an advisor.[29][30]
Bengio currently serves as scientific and technical advisor for Recursion Pharmaceuticals[31] and scientific advisor for Valence Discovery.[32]
At the first AI Safety Summit in November 2023, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced that Bengio would lead an international scientific report on the safety of advanced AI. The report was delivered at the AI Seoul Summit in May 2024, and covered issues such as the potential for cyber attacks and 'loss of control' scenarios.[33][34][35]
In May 2023, Bengio stated in an interview to BBC that he felt "lost" over his life's work. He raised his concern about "bad actors" getting hold of AI, especially as it becomes more sophisticated and powerful. He called for better regulation, product registration, ethical training, and more involvement from governments in tracking and auditing AI products.[39][40]
Speaking with the Financial Times in May 2023, Bengio said that he supported the monitoring of access to AI systems such as ChatGPT so that potentially illegal or dangerous uses could be tracked.[41] In July 2023, he published a piece in The Economist arguing that "the risk of catastrophe is real enough that action is needed now."[42]
Bengio co-authored a letter with Geoffrey Hinton and others in support of SB 1047, a California AI safety bill that would require companies training models which cost more than $100 million to perform risk assessments before deployment. They claimed the legislation was the "bare minimum for effective regulation of this technology."[43][44]
Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville: Deep Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning), MIT Press, Cambridge (USA), 2016. ISBN 978-0262035613.
Dzmitry Bahdanau; Kyunghyun Cho; Yoshua Bengio (2014). "Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate". arXiv:1409.0473 [cs.CL].
Léon Bottou, Patrick Haffner, Paul G. Howard, Patrice Simard, Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun: High Quality Document Image Compression with DjVu, In: Journal of Electronic Imaging, Band 7, 1998, S. 410–425 doi:10.1117/1.482609
Bengio, Yoshua; Schuurmans, Dale; Lafferty, John; Williams, Chris K. I. and Culotta, Aron (eds.), Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 22 (NIPS'22), December 7th–10th, 2009, Vancouver, BC, Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) Foundation, 2009
Y. Bengio, Dong-Hyun Lee, Jorg Bornschein, Thomas Mesnard, Zhouhan Lin: Towards Biologically Plausible Deep Learning, arXiv.org, 2016
Bengio contributed one chapter to Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it, Packt Publishing, 2018, ISBN 978-1-78-913151-2, by the American futurist Martin Ford.[55]
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