Godfather of AI Yoshua Bengio launches non-profit LawZero to keep AI from lying

Yoshua Bengio, popularly known as one of the 'Godfathers of AI', on Tuesday launched LawZero, a non-profit organisation to build safer AI systems. 

The new venture brings together leading AI researchers to focus on safety-first development, addressing growing concerns about dangerous capabilities emerging in AI models. These behaviours include deception, self-preservation, and goal misalignment. 

The firm aims to tackle issues with newer AI systems, such as algorithmic bias, misuse, and loss of control, while advancing research to build reliable and secure AI solutions.

"LawZero is the result of the new scientific direction I undertook in 2023, after recognising the rapid progress made by private labs toward Artificial General Intelligence and beyond, as well as its profound implications for humanity," said Yoshua Bengio, President and Scientific Director at LawZero. 

"Current frontier systems are already showing signs of self-preservation and deceptive behaviours, and this will only accelerate as their capabilities and degree of agency increase. LawZero is my team's constructive response to these challenges. It's an approach to AI that is not only powerful but also fundamentally safe. At LawZero, we believe that at the heart of every AI frontier system, there should be one guiding principle above all: The protection of human joy and endeavour," he added. 

LawZero's team of over 15 researchers is developing “Scientist AI,” a new approach to creating safer AI systems. Unlike agentic AI models—built to act independently—Scientist AI focuses on understanding and providing truthful answers based on clear, transparent reasoning.

The company's new approach will provide oversight for agentic AI systems, push scientific discovery, and advance the understanding of AI risks and how to avoid them.

The AI safety lab has secured $30 million in philanthropic funding during its incubation phase, with contributions from prominent investors such as Skype founding engineer Jaan Tallinn, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Open Philanthropy, and the Future of Life Institute, among others. 

Bengio, alongside Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, are widely regarded as the 'Godfather of AI'. The trio shared the 2018 Turing Award—one of the highest honours in the field of computer science—for their work on deep learning and neural networks. 

As a professor at the University of Montreal and co-founder of the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA), Bengio has authored several research papers and helped train many of the researchers now leading AI development at major tech companies.

His work on neural networks, particularly in natural language processing and representation learning, has been fundamental to advances in machine translation, speech recognition, and large language models (LLMs).

Recently, Bengio has become increasingly vocal about AI safety concerns, shifting much of his focus from research to advocacy for responsible AI development. He has publicly supported regulatory measures, including California's controversial SB 1047 bill, which aimed to prevent AI systems from causing catastrophic harm.