AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio hits 1M Google Scholar citations

Computer scientist Yoshua Bengio has become the first living person to surpass one million citations on Google Scholar, cementing his status as one of the most influential AI researchers in history.

Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal and one of the godfathers of artificial intelligence, has achieved a historic milestone by becoming the first researcher to have their work cited more than one million times on Google Scholar. This unprecedented achievement was announced on November 12, 2025, though the milestone was actually reached in late October.

Bengio, who shared the prestigious A.M. Turing Award in 2019 with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun for their foundational work on neural networks, has been instrumental in shaping the modern AI landscape. His most cited work, the 2014 paper “Generative Adversarial Nets” co-authored with Ian Goodfellow, has alone garnered over 105,000 citations.

The achievement places Bengio as the most cited computer scientist globally and the most-cited living scientist across all fields by total citations. Only French philosopher Michel Foucault has also exceeded one million citations on the platform. Geoffrey Hinton is expected to join this select group in the coming months.

Despite the recognition, Bengio remains humble about citation metrics. “It should not become an objective for researchers to have more citations, because it leads into trying to optimize this rather than do good science and go after the truth,” he told Nature.

As Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute, Bengio continues to influence the direction of AI research while also advocating for responsible AI development, warning about potential existential risks the technology poses to humanity.