#Yoshua Bengio

The third Godfather of Deep Learning, who spent his career building the mathematical foundations of neural network learning and who has, in the years since the ChatGPT moment, become one of the most active and most credible advocates for AI safety research and AI regulation. Why the person who built so much of what AI is now believes that the field's progress requires governance it has been reluctant to accept.

The personal story of Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, and their collaborators during the years when neural network research was marginalised, underfunded, and dismissed. The decades of intellectual courage, the specific ideas that kept the research programme alive, and the slow accumulation of results that eventually made the field pay attention. How the most important research programme in modern AI survived by going underground.

The third Godfather of Deep Learning — his foundational contributions to recurrent networks, attention mechanisms, and generative models, his evolution from pure researcher to the field's most prominent voice for AI safety and ethics, and why the man who spent his career building increasingly powerful AI systems has become one of the most persuasive voices for ensuring those systems are safe.