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Yoshua Bengio
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Yoshua Bengio

Canadian deep-learning pioneer and one of the “godfathers of AI”

5 March 1964 Canada Verified by our editors
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Age
62 yrs
Birthday in 119 days
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Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist at the Université de Montréal and one of the pioneers of deep learning. He founded Mila, the Quebec AI institute, and shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. He is among the most cited scientists in the world and a leading voice on AI safety.

Biography

Early life

Bengio was born in Paris to Moroccan Jewish parents and moved to Montreal as a child. He studied electrical engineering and computer science at McGill University, earning his PhD in 1991, and did postdoctoral work at MIT and Bell Labs.

Deep learning

At the Université de Montréal from 1993, Bengio persisted with neural networks when they were out of fashion. His 2003 neural probabilistic language model introduced word embeddings for language, and his lab’s work on attention mechanisms in 2014 helped lead to the transformer models behind modern chatbots. He also co-developed generative adversarial networks with his student Ian Goodfellow.

Mila

He founded Mila, now one of the world’s largest academic deep-learning research centres, and was its scientific director until 2025, helping make Montreal a global AI hub.

AI safety

Since 2023 Bengio has warned about the risks of advanced AI. He chaired the International AI Safety Report commissioned after the 2023 Bletchley Park summit and in 2025 launched LawZero, a non-profit working on safe AI design.

Timeline

  1. 1964

    Born in Paris, France

  2. 1991

    PhD from McGill

  3. 1993

    Joins Université de Montréal

  4. 2003

    Neural probabilistic language model

  5. 2014

    Attention mechanism for translation; GANs with Goodfellow

  6. 2016

    Co-authors the Deep Learning textbook

  7. 2018

    Turing Award

  8. 2025

    Launches LawZero

Notable works

  • 2003

    A Neural Probabilistic Language Model Paper

  • 2014

    Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate Paper

    With Dzmitry Bahdanau and Kyunghyun Cho.

  • 2016

    Deep Learning Book

    With Ian Goodfellow and Aaron Courville.

Awards and honours

  • Officer of the Order of Canada

    2017

  • Turing Award

    2018

  • Fellow of the Royal Society

    2020

  • Princess of Asturias Award

    2022

Did you know?

  1. 1

    His brother Samy Bengio is also a well-known AI researcher.

  2. 2

    In November 2025 he became the first AI researcher with more than a million Google Scholar citations.

  3. 3

    He signed the 2023 statement warning that AI could pose an extinction risk.

Connections

Related people

Also born on 5 March

Frequently asked

Who is Yoshua Bengio?

Yoshua Bengio is a Canadian computer scientist at the Université de Montréal and one of the pioneers of deep learning. He founded Mila, the Quebec AI institute, and shared the 2018 Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. He is among the most cited scientists in the world and a leading voice on AI safety.

How old is Yoshua Bengio?

Yoshua Bengio is 62 years old, born on 5 March 1964 in Paris, France.

Where is Yoshua Bengio from?

Yoshua Bengio was born in Paris, France.

What is Yoshua Bengio known for?

Yoshua Bengio is best known for Deep learning; neural language models; attention; founding Mila; Turing Award 2018.

What awards has Yoshua Bengio received?

Notable honours include Officer of the Order of Canada (2017), Turing Award (2018), Fellow of the Royal Society (2020), Princess of Asturias Award (2022).

References

  1. Yoshua Bengio — Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  2. Yoshua Bengio — Goodreads author page. Goodreads. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  3. Yoshua Bengio — Hindi Wikipedia. Wikipedia (Hindi). Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  4. Official website. yoshuabengio.org. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
  5. Yoshua Bengio (Q3572699) — structured data. Wikidata. Retrieved 4 November 2026.

Includes material from the Wikipedia article “Yoshua Bengio”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. That text is available under the same licence. Learn more

External links

Official website Website Wikipedia
Filed under Artificial intelligenceDeep learningMilaTuring Award Computer ScientistProfessor

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“Yoshua Bengio.” TrackFame, last updated 5 November 2026. https://trackfame.com/person/yoshua-bengio

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