creators

Yoshua Bengio: Mila founder and LawZero co-president

Yoshua Bengio, 2018 Turing Award laureate, is a Universite de Montreal professor, Mila's founder and scientific advisor, and co-president of LawZero.

Yoshua Bengio (born in Paris, 5 March 1964) is one of the founding figures of deep learning. He took a B.Eng, an M.Sc and a 1991 PhD at McGill University and joined the Universite de Montreal in 1993, where he is a full professor of computer science and operations research and holds a Canada CIFAR AI Chair. He founded Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, and led it as scientific director until March 2025, when he moved to a new post of Founder and Scientific Advisor. He shared the 2018 ACM A.M. Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for the breakthroughs that made deep neural networks a critical component of computing, and is among the most-cited scientists in any field. In June 2025 he launched LawZero, a Montreal nonprofit for safe-by-design AI, where he is co-president and scientific director. Its programme, Scientist AI, aims at non-agentic systems that explain rather than pursue goals of their own; in September 2026 Canada and Germany committed up to CAD $300 million to it. He also leads the International AI Safety Report, whose second edition appeared in February 2026.

Specialization

deep learning, AI safety, generative models, AI policy

Country

Canada