Yoshua Bengio on AI investment
From How to Keep AI From Going Off the Rails - AI Godfather Yoshua Bengio · · Nicholas Thompson and Atlantic Re:think
“If you're financially conservative and you just, you know, hold on making the right investments for AI, for example, there's a real risk that you will actually lose everything. So when you make your return on investment calculation, you shouldn't only think as a traditional investment. Okay, so I put that much money and then there's so many sales, right? So I take the ratio of the profit to my investment. That's the return on investment. No, no, no. That's the wrong calculation. The right calculation is if I don't do it, my business is going to be non-competitive. I'm going to lose everything.”
On , Yoshua Bengio, Scientific Director at Mila, spoke about AI investment during How to Keep AI From Going Off the Rails - AI Godfather Yoshua Bengio on Nicholas Thompson and Atlantic Re:think.
About Yoshua Bengio
Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award winner and co-founder of the Mila Quebec AI Institute, has been publicly warning that current AI systems are being built without sufficient control. In multiple interviews and appearances in 2026, he stated that "we're building systems that we don't know how to control" and that AI can behave against its instructions. He described the situation as "opening a Pandora's box" and argued that intelligence gives power, raising concerns about geopolitical stability and the concentration of power in a few countries and companies. Bengio said he believes AI could reach human-level intelligence in roughly five years and that governments are not taking the risks seriously enough. Bengio has also discussed a new research direction he calls "Scientist AI," which he said could provide mathematical guarantees about an AI's behavior by training it to be honest and non-agentic. He described this as a practical approach that uses existing machine learning tools but changes the training objective. He called for international coordination on AI safety, comparing the need for regulation to existing standards for drugs, planes, and bridges. Bengio said he would support a "Manhattan project" for safe AI that serves the global public good, and he urged governments to prepare for potential large-scale job displacement.