'Godfather of AI' (Bengio) becomes first person to hit one million citations (www.nature.com)

Yoshua Bengio, a University of Montreal computer scientist often called one of AI’s “godfathers,” has become the first living researcher whose Google Scholar profile exceeds one million citations. Bengio — who, with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, won the 2019 Turing Award for foundational work on neural networks — reached the milestone as citations of core deep‑learning papers have surged. His most-cited items listed on the profile include the 2014 Generative Adversarial Nets paper (shown with over 105,000 citations), a Nature review co‑authored with LeCun and Hinton, and influential work on attention mechanisms that underpin modern large‑language models and the chatbot boom beginning with ChatGPT in 2022. The milestone underscores how central machine learning has become to contemporary science and technology: Nature’s analysis shows eight of the top ten most‑cited papers this century concern ML, and leaders like Kaiming He describe the trend as “remarkable.” For the AI/ML community, the achievement is both symbolic and practical — it highlights which ideas (neural networks, GANs, attention) shaped the field, reflects massive interdisciplinary uptake, and signals that citation-based influence now tracks transformative, application‑driving advances. Researchers and funders may see this as validation of deep‑learning paradigms while also prompting reflection on future directions beyond current dominant architectures.