
#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
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