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 · last 12 months

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

And that's a place where we also need actually more technical research on verification methodologies that could be at the basis of treaties between say the US and China, which don't trust each other.

There is not enough research going on there, but a lot of people are starting to think about this and think it's quite feasible to change some of the programming or even the hardware to make these kinds of verification reliable.

And we should do more governments,

should realize that if they want to end up with a treaty that they would sign, they need to incentivize that kind of research as well.

Also, governments need to,

understand how transformative AI will be.

So I think a lot of the wrong thinking in many governments, I've been around the world talking to many, many different governments, like at least a dozen in the last year.

The biggest mistake is to view AI in the future as if it was just a slightly beefed up version of the AI we have now.

and then focusing on AI as a normal technology that they would compete with other countries and focusing on deployment

Like, because you get more productivity, for example, and not so much on the risks.

And in great part, this is, again, because people in government, just like most people, don't really digest the idea that we are on the verge of creating entities that can compete with humans and that could become tools of absolute power in the wrong hands.

I'm not saying it will happen, but even if it's only a 10% chance that capabilities rise to that level in the coming years or whatever, this should completely alert politicians that they have to do something about it.

But the fact that they're not doing it tells me that they haven't yet integrated

that scientific reality that we are on track and we see already on a small scale, the progress towards these kinds of machines.

So they need to wake up from their old mental constructs of seeing technology as mostly from an economic perspective, or even giving them a military advantage,

and not realizing we're like opening a Pandora's box with incredible unknown unknowns of magnitude of impact, both positive and negative, that is very hard to anticipate.

So that's where I would ask governments to start like,

reading more, listening more, and just spending a bit more attention on understanding what is going on with AI, where it is going, and what this could potentially mean.

I wish I had the answer to this.

But I can say a few things.

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