Doom Index / p(doom) / Yoshua Bengio
Researcher · rank 15 of 22
Yoshua Bengio p(doom)
Yoshua Bengio (Turing Award laureate; founder, Mila & LawZero) has put the risk of AI causing human extinction or a comparably bad outcome at 20%. That is lower than the 38% median of the experts we track.
Latest stated p(doom)
20%
0%Median 38%100%
Stated Jul 15, 2023
Statement history
- Jul 15, 2023
20%
“I got around, like, 20 per cent probability that it turns out catastrophic.”
ABC News (Australia), Background BriefingVerified Oct 21, 2026
Context
“p(doom)” is shorthand for the probability that advanced AI leads to human extinction or a similarly irreversible catastrophe. Speakers rarely share one definition or time horizon, so compare numbers with care.
The Doom Index uses the midpoint of each person's latest stated range (20% here) when computing the expert median.
See the full leaderboardOther experts' p(doom)
Roman Yampolskiy 99.999999%Eliezer Yudkowsky 99.5%Dan Hendrycks >80%Daniel Kokotajlo 70%Zvi Mowshowitz 70%Emad Mostaque 50%Holden Karnofsky 10–90%Jan Leike 10–90%Paul Christiano 46%Joep Meindertsma 40%Eli Lifland 35–40%Scott Alexander 33%Emmett Shear 5–50%Dario Amodei 25%Elon Musk 20%Reid Hoffman 2 / 10Lina Khan 15%Vitalik Buterin 12%Geoffrey Hinton ~10%Nate Silver 5–10%Yann LeCun ≈0%
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