Yoshua Bengio

speaker

2,216 appearances 5 recordings 5 series first heard Oct 2018 last heard 7 May

Yoshua Bengio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.

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80,000 Hours Podcast · #243 – 'Godfather of AI' Yoshua Bengio: "I now see a path" to safe superintelligent AI · 7 May 2026 podcast

There is uncertainty.

In other words, we don't know how things are going to unfold.

We don't know if the game that the companies are playing now in terms of safety is going to be sufficient.

But if they fail and we continue with capability advances, then the consequences could be really terrible.

So even if we don't know the probability of some catastrophic event, we should apply the precautionary principle.

So what it's saying is when you are in a situation where one action could lead into something terribly bad, but you're not sure what is the probability for that.

Is it 1% or is it 90% or is it 0.1%?

You don't really know.

And in our case, there is that kind of uncertainty because you have,

respected people who are very concerned and other respected people who think it's going to be fine.

So if you're in a driver's seat and you're faced with these different voices, even within the same person, they would one day say it's going to be fine and the other, oh, this may be very dangerous.

You should just bite the bullet.

Okay, there is uncertainty about something potentially catastrophic.

And then you should act with precaution, which means you should invest a lot more in AI safety research in this case, you should invest a lot more in the incentives that would push companies to behave better with respect to the public good, just like we've done in other industries, by the way.

But it's important to really point out that we have to bite the bullet that there is a lot of uncertainty.

And there's going to continue to be, I think.

And it's going to continue to be because it's too easy to, for example, for people who want to feel comfortable about the whole thing, to just listen to the voices that are reassuring.

And in fact, we do it internally as well.

And so we just have to be honest that there is uncertainty and the stakes are very high.

And so that should guide our decision-making towards being on the precautious side.

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