A little over two years ago, AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio was among the loudest voices calling for a moratorium on AI model development to focus on safety standards. No one paused. Instead, companies dumped hundreds of billions of dollars into building more advanced models that could execute long chains of reasoning and increasingly take autonomous action on behalf of users. And today, Bengio, considered one of the “godfathers of AI,” is as concerned as ever. “If we build machines that are way smarter than us and have their own preservation goals, that’s dangerous,” he said. Bengio is a professor at Université de Montréal and the founder and scientific adviser of Mila, an AI research institute for Quebec. Earlier this year, he also launched LawZero, a nonprofit research organization aimed at exploring how to build AI models that are truly safe.

Full opinion : Yoshua Bengio worries about AI’s capacity to deceive users in pursuit of its own goals.