Bengio was born in
France to a
Jewish family who emigrated to France from Morocco, and then relocated again to Canada.[15] He received his
Bachelor of Science degree (electrical engineering),
MSc (computer science) and
PhD (computer science) from
McGill University.[2][16]
Bengio is the brother of
Samy Bengio,[15] also an influential computer scientist working with neural networks, who is currently Senior Director of AI and ML Research at
Apple.
The Bengio brothers lived in Morocco for a year during their father's military service there.[15] His father, Carlo Bengio was a pharmacist and a playwright; he ran a Sephardic theater company in Montreal that performed pieces in
Judeo-Arabic.[17][18] 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.[19]
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.[21] 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.[22][23] As of December 2022, he had the 2nd highest Discipline H-index (D-index) in computer science.[24] Thanks to a 2019 article on a novel RNN architecture, Bengio has an
Erdős number of 3.[25]
In October 2016, Bengio co-founded
Element AI, a
Montreal-based
artificial intelligenceincubator that turns AI research into real-world business applications.[21] The company sold its operations to ServiceNow in November 2020,[26]
with Bengio remaining at ServiceNow as an advisor.[27][28]
Bengio currently serves as scientific and technical advisor for Recursion Pharmaceuticals[29] and scientific advisor for Valence Discovery.[30]
Views on AI
Following concerns raised by AI experts about the
existential risks AI poses on humanity, 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.[31][32]
Speaking with the
Financial Times also 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.[33] In July 2023, he published a piece in
The Economist arguing that "the risk of catastrophe is real enough that action is needed now."[34]
Ian Goodfellow, Yoshua Bengio and Aaron Courville: Deep Learning (Adaptive Computation and Machine Learning), MIT Press, Cambridge (USA), 2016.
ISBN978-0262035613.
Dzmitry Bahdanau; Kyunghyun Cho; Yoshua Bengio (2014). "Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate".
arXiv:1409.0473 [
cs.CL].
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
Bengio contributed one chapter to Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building it, Packt Publishing, 2018,
ISBN978-1-78-913151-2, by the American futurist
Martin Ford.[44]
^
ab"Yoshua Bengio". Profiles. Canadian Institute For Advanced Research.
Archived from the original on August 15, 2016. Retrieved July 31, 2016.
^Levy, Elias (May 8, 2019).
"À la mémoire de Carlo Bengio". The Canadian Jewish News.
Archived from the original on April 10, 2021. Retrieved February 24, 2021.
^
abBengio, Yoshua.
"CV". Département d'informatique et de recherche opérationnelle. Université de Montréal. Archived from
the original on March 6, 2018. Retrieved July 31, 2016.