AI godfather Yoshua Bengio launches non-profit for honest AI, warns current models are lying to you

India Today

04-06-2025

'Today's AI agents are trained to please and imitate—not always to tell the truth,' says Yoshua Bengio, one of the world's most respected AI researchers, who is also one of the three AI godfathers. Bengio says so as he launched a new non-profit called LawZero with a big mission: stop rogue AI before it does real harm. With $30 million in initial funding and a team of expert researchers, Bengio wants to build something called 'Scientist AI' – a tool that acts like a psychologist for machines.advertisement'We want to build AIs that will be honest and not deceptive,' Bengio said. Unlike today's AI agents, which he describes as 'actors' trying to imitate humans and please users, Scientist AI will work more like a neutral observer. Its job is to predict when another AI might act in a harmful or dishonest way – and flag or stop it.'It has a sense of humility,' Bengio said of his new model. Instead of pretending to know everything, it will give probabilities, not firm answers. 'It isn't sure about the answer,' he added.The goal? Create a kind of safety net that can monitor powerful AI agents before they go off track. These agents are increasingly being used to complete tasks without human supervision, raising fears about what could happen if one starts making dangerous decisions or tries to avoid being shut down.advertisement
Scientist AI would assess how likely it is that an AI's actions could cause harm. If the risk is too high, it could block that action entirely.It's an ambitious plan but Bengio knows it has to scale. 'The point is to demonstrate the methodology so that then we can convince either donors or governments or AI labs to put the resources that are needed to train this at the same scale as the current frontier AIs,' he said. 'It is really important that the guardrail AI be at least as smart as the AI agent that it is trying to monitor and control.'Bengio's efforts are backed by major names in AI safety, including the Future of Life Institute, Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, and Schmidt Sciences, a research group set up by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.His initiative comes at a time when concerns about AI safety are rising — even among those who helped build it.Take Geoffrey Hinton – another AI godfather and Bengio's co-winner of the 2018 Turing Award – for instance. Hinton has spent the last few years warning the public about AI's risks. He's talked about machines that could spread misinformation, manipulate people, or become too smart for us to control.advertisementBut in a recent interview with CBS, Hinton made a surprising confession: he trusts AI more than he probably should. He uses OpenAI's GPT-4 model every day and admitted, 'I tend to believe what it says, even though I should probably be suspicious.'That said, Hinton, who left Google in 2023 to speak more freely about AI dangers, remains deeply concerned about where the technology is heading. He's warned that AI systems could become persuasive enough to influence public opinion or destabilise society. Still, his recent comments show the dilemma many experts face: they're impressed by AI's power, but worried by its unpredictability.And then there's Yann LeCun, the third godfather of AI and Meta's top AI scientist. Unlike Bengio or Hinton, LeCun isn't too worried. In fact, he thinks people are overreacting.In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, last year, LeCun had said that today's AI systems don't even come close to human intelligence – or animal intelligence, for that matter. 'It's complete BS,' he said about the doomsday talk around AI. 'It seems to me that before 'urgently figuring out how to control AI systems much smarter than us' we need to have the beginning of a hint of a design for a system smarter than a house cat,' he quipped.advertisementLeCun played a major role in shaping today's AI, especially in image and speech recognition. At Meta, his teams continue to build powerful tools that help run everything from automatic translation to content moderation. He believes AI is still just a useful tool – not something to fear.Their different approaches highlight an important truth: when it comes to AI, even the experts don't agree. But if Bengio's project takes off, we might soon have systems smart enough – and honest enough – to keep each other in check.