Who is Yoshua Bengio? ‘Godfather of AI’ becomes first researcher to hit one million Google Scholar citations

Renowned computer scientist Yoshua Bengio has made history by becoming the first living researcher to surpass one million citations on Google Scholar, a milestone almost unheard of in modern academia. The achievement reflects not only Bengio’s towering influence on the field of artificial intelligence but also the dramatic global surge in deep-learning research over the past decade. As AI reshapes science, industry and everyday life, Bengio’s work stands at the very centre of this transformative era. Bengio, a professor at the Université de Montréal, is celebrated as one of the three “godfathers of AI” alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun. Together, they transformed neural networks from an overlooked research niche into the foundation of modern deep learning, the technology power