One of the Fathers of AI Is Worried About Its Future
Yoshua Bengio wants to stop talk of an AI arms race and make the technology more accessible to the developing world
By Will Knight
Yoshua Bengio is a grandmaster of modern artificial intelligence.
Alongside Geoff Hinton and Yan LeCun, Bengio is famous for championing a technique known as deep learning that in recent years has gone from an academic curiosity to one of the most powerful technologies on the planet.
Deep learning involves feeding data to large, crudely-simulated neural networks, and it has proven incredibly powerful and effective for all sorts of practical tasks, from voice recognition and image classification to controlling self-driving cars and automating business decisions.
Bengio has resisted the lure of any big tech company. While Hinton and LeCun joined Google and Facebook respectively, he remains a full-time professor at the University of Montreal. (He did, however, cofound Element AI in 2016, a company that built a very successful business helping big companies explore the commercial applications of AI research.)
Bengio met with MIT Technology Review’s senior editor for AI, Will Knight, at an MIT event recently.
