Oriol Vinyals

Oriol Vinyals grew up in Sabadell, near Barcelona, and took a double degree in mathematics and telecommunications engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya before graduate study in California, finishing with a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley. At Google Brain he wrote, with Ilya Sutskever and Quoc Le, the September 2014 paper "Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks," which used one neural network to read a sentence and another to write its translation. On English-to-French translation it scored 34.8 BLEU, above the 33.3 of a phrase-based system on the same data. In March 2015 he, Geoffrey Hinton and Jeff Dean described knowledge distillation, training a small network to imitate a large one.

At DeepMind in London he led AlphaStar, a StarCraft II agent trained with imitation and multi-agent reinforcement learning. In January 2019 it beat two professional players, and in October 2019 Nature reported that it had reached Grandmaster level on Battle.net, the game's public online ladder, ranking above 99.8 percent of active players while limited to a camera view and action rate comparable to a human's.

He became a vice president of research, and the December 2023 Gemini technical report named him and Dean the overall technical leads of Gemini, the model family built after DeepMind merged with Google Brain. In November 2025 his alma mater made him an honorary doctor.

On 5 August 2026, the day Demis Hassabis stepped back as chief executive, Vinyals left Google DeepMind to co-found Discovery Loop with Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and Quoc Le, a public benefit corporation that aims to automate the experimental loop of research. Speaking at the Agentic AI Summit in September 2026, he said AI systems would increasingly improve themselves but that the hardest step to automate was "research taste," the judgment of which ideas are worth pursuing.