A French-Canadian computer scientist and pioneer of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Deep Learning. Bengio is currently the most-cited computer scientist globally (by both total citations and by h-index, which is used to assess researcher output based on publications and citations they have received) and the most cited living scientist across all fields.
In 2018, he along with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun won the ACM A.M. Turing Award for their foundational work on Deep Learning. They are sometimes referred to as the “Godfathers of AI.”
In June 2025, The Guardian reported that Bengio had launched a nonprofit organization, LawZero, aimed at building “honest” AI systems that can detect and block harmful behavior by Autonomous Agents. The group is developing a system called Scientist AI, intended to act as a guardrail by predicting whether an agent’s actions could cause harm.