The Most-Cited Computer Scientist Has a Plan to Make AI More Trustworthy

On June 3, Yoshua Bengio, the world's most-cited computer scientist, announced the launch of LawZero, a nonprofit that aims to create "safe by design" AI by pursuing a fundamentally different approach to major tech companies. Players like OpenAI and Google are investing heavily in AI agents--systems that not only answer queries and generate images, but can craft plans and take actions in the world. The goal of these companies is to create virtual employees that can do practically any job a human can, known in the tech industry as artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Executives like Google DeepMind's CEO Demis Hassabis point to AGI's potential to solve climate change or cure disease as a motivator for its development. Bengio, however, says we don't need agentic systems to reap AI's rewards--it's a false choice.