#243 – 'Godfather of AI' Yoshua Bengio: "I now see a path" to safe superintelligent AI

#243 – 'Godfather of AI' Yoshua Bengio: "I now see a path" to safe superintelligent AI

From 80,000 Hours Podcast by The 80,000 Hours team

May 7, 2026 · 2h 35m

About this episode

Yoshua Bengio discusses his vision for ensuring AI is honest and incapable of deception through a new training architecture.

The co-inventor of modern AI and the most cited living scientist believes he's figured out how to ensure AI is honest, incapable of deception, and never goes rogue. Yoshua Bengio – Turing Award Winner and founder of LawZero – is disturbed by the many unintended drives and goals present in today's AIs, their willingness to lie, and ability to tell when they're being tested. AI companies are trying to stamp out these behaviours in a 'cat-and-mouse game' that Yoshua fears they're losing. --- Our new book is "a ridiculously in-depth guide to finding a fulfilling career that does good" and is out now! Order from your local bookstore, or online at https://80k.info/career-guide --- But Yoshua is optimistic: he believes the companies can win this battle decisively with a single rearrangement to how AI models are trained, and has been developing mathematical proofs to back up the claim. The core idea is that instead of training AI to predict what a human would say, or to produce responses we'd rate highly, we should train it to model what's actually true. Yoshua argues this new architecture, which he calls 'Scientist AI,' is a small enough change that we could keep almost all the…

People in this episode

Guest: Yoshua Bengio

Topics covered

  • AI safety
  • superintelligent AI
  • training models
  • honesty in AI
  • deception in AI

Keywords

  • AI
  • superintelligence
  • Scientist AI
  • deception
  • training methods

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: LawZero

Products: Claude, ChatGPT

More episodes of 80,000 Hours Podcast

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the 80,000 Hours Podcast podcast page.