The co-inventor of modern AI and the most cited living scientist believes he’s figured out how to ensure AI is honest, incapable of deception, and never goes rogue. Yoshua Bengio – Turing Award Winner and founder of LawZero – is disturbed by the many unintended drives and goals present in today’s AIs, their ability to tell when they’re being tested, and demonstrated willingness to lie. AI companies are trying to stamp these out in a ‘cat-and-mouse game’ that Yoshua fears they’re losing.

But Yoshua is optimistic: he believes the companies can win this battle decisively with a single rearrangement to how AI models are trained, and has been developing mathematical proofs to back up the claim. The core idea is that instead of training AI to predict what a human would say, or to produce responses we’d rate highly, we should train it to model what’s actually true.

Learn more & full transcript: https://80k.info/bengio.

Yoshua argues this new architecture, which he calls “Scientist AI,” is a small enough change that we could keep almost all the techniques and data we use to train frontier AIs like Claude and ChatGPT. And that the new architecture need not cost more, could be built iteratively, and might be more capable as well as more honest.

Until recently, the biggest practical objection to Scientist AI was simple: the world wants agents, and Scientist AI isn’t one. But in new research, Yoshua has extended the design and believes the same honest predictor can be turned into a capable agent without losing its \.