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

I guess it's easier for people who are already established.

I see a lot of my students who seem to understand what I'm talking about and kind of generally agree that this is dangerous, but in their mental decision-making calculation, there is like, oh, what about my career, my family?

I need to have like a good salary.

Yeah, I completely agree with you, but there is a professional anxiety in the machine learning students, which is kind of surprising.

So if I go back 10 years ago, or even 15 years ago, when even before deep learning was something people talked about,

the salaries for people coming out of, you know, in my group, like with a PhD in machine learning, were like nothing compared to what we have now.

But people were not as anxious about that somehow.

And I don't know, maybe it's a status thing because there are these crazy salaries, people feel like drawn to this as they have to achieve that status

even though they don't actually need to earn millions of dollars per year.

I mean, it's much more important, in my opinion, to think of what kind of world will they live in or their children will live in.

But that is what's happening.

Again, it's not rational.

It's human psychology at play.

I'd rather stay out of the PDoom game, but let me explain why.

It's connected to my discourse about uncertainty that I keep saying, okay, I myself don't feel like 100% sure that what I see as plausible is going to happen, but I do recognize that there's a lot of uncertainty.

So putting a number like this is making a big commitment about what's going to actually happen where we don't have scientific data about how to calculate such a number.

So I'm much more comfortable with saying, well, it could be small, it could be large, but that's a large interval in which the probability is way too high for my taste and for the future of my children.

And so whatever it is, so long as it's not 10 to the minus 20, I'm not happy and I'll do something about it.

It's a good question.

I would say something that's difficult for people to do, which is try to leave your prior beliefs about intelligence and the efficiency of markets or whatever your beliefs, and just try to focus on the evidence, the evidence that has been collected empirically by the companies and academics and nonprofits in the last couple of years, especially,

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