One of the three “Godfathers of AI” became the first person to receive 1 million citations on Google Scholar.
Yoshua Bengio pioneered generative adversarial nets, two AI networks which compete with each other. One tries to make outputs, such as text or images, which are indistinguishable from human-made ones. The other tries to tell whether those outputs are real. That paper was crucial in the development of generative AI, and alone has 105,000 citations; for comparison, Einstein’s 1915 paper on general relativity has 11,000.
The “Godfathers” are divided on the future of AI: Bengio told Nature that it posed “existential risks” to humanity, a fear Geoffrey Hinton shares but Yann Lecun, Meta’s (potentially outgoing) chief AI scientist, disparages.