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The individual known as the ‘Godfather of AI’ has achieved a significant milestone by becoming the first person to reach one million citations. This achievement positions machine-learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio as the most referenced researcher on Google Scholar.

Yoshua Bengio, a computer scientist based at the University of Montreal in Canada, has attained a remarkable feat of surpassing one million citations for his work on Google Scholar, making him the first living individual to do so. Renowned for his groundbreaking contributions to machine learning, Bengio is recognized as a key figure in artificial intelligence (AI), standing alongside fellow computer scientists Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto in Canada and Yann LeCun from Meta in New York City. The trio jointly received the prestigious A. M. Turing Award in 2019 for their advancements in neural networks.

Among Bengio’s most cited works is a collaborative paper from 2014 titled Generative Adversarial Nets with over 105,000 citations on Google Scholar, as well as a Nature review article co-authored with LeCun and Hinton. His research portfolio also encompasses studies on ‘attention’, a methodology that aids machines in text analysis and played a pivotal role in driving the chatbot revolution, starting with ChatGPT in 2022.

This outstanding accomplishment underscores the surging popularity of machine learning, notes Kaiming He, a computer scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge and co-author of the most cited paper of the twenty-first century, according to an analysis published by Nature earlier this year. Out of the top ten most referenced papers in this century, eight are related to machine learning.

Bengio expresses his conviction that “AI is transforming our world, and we have only scratched the surface,” in an interview with Nature.