From the ‘godfathers of AI’ to newer people in the field: Here are 17 people you should know — and what they say about the possibilities and dangers of the technology.

Yoshua Bengio is a professor of computer science at the University of Montreal.

Yoshua Bengio also earned the “godfather of AI” nickname after winning the Turing Award with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun.

Bengio’s research primarily focuses on artificial neural networks, deep learning, and machine learning. In 2022, Bengio became the computer scientist with the highest h-index — a metric for evaluating the cumulative impact of an author’s scholarly output — in the world, according to his website. 

In addition to his academic work, Bengio also co-founded Element AI, a startup that develops AI software solutions for businesses that was acquired by the cloud company ServiceNow in 2020. 

Bengio has expressed concern about the rapid development of AI. He was one of 33,000 people who signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on AI development. Hinton, Open AI CEO Sam Altman, and Elon Musk also signed the letter.

“Today’s systems are not anywhere close to posing an existential risk,” he previously said. “But in one, two, five years? There is too much uncertainty.”

When that time comes, though, Bengio warns that we should also be wary of humans who have control of the technology.

Some people with “a lot of power” may want to replace humanity with machines, Bengio said at the One Young World Summit in Montreal. “Having systems that know more than most people can be dangerous in the wrong hands and create more instability at a geopolitical level, for example, or terrorism.”