Co-founder of Discovery Loop
A deep-learning researcher at DeepMind who co-invented sequence-to-sequence learning, led AlphaStar and was a technical lead on Gemini.
Oriol Vinyals is a Spanish machine learning researcher who spent most of his career at DeepMind. Born in Sabadell, Catalonia, he studied mathematics and telecommunication engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, then a master's at UC San Diego and a PhD at UC Berkeley in 2013 under Nelson Morgan.
He co-invented the sequence-to-sequence model for machine translation with Ilya Sutskever and Quoc Le, and led DeepMind's AlphaStar group, which applies AI to StarCraft II. MIT Technology Review named him one of its 35 innovators under 35 in 2016, and he was a technical lead on Gemini with Jeff Dean. According to Wikipedia, on 5 August 2026 he announced he was leaving Gemini to start Discovery Loop with Jeff Dean, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat.
With Ilya Sutskever and Quoc Le, introduced the seq2seq model for machine translation, a foundational technique in natural language processing.
Led the group behind AlphaStar, an AI system for StarCraft II that reached Grandmaster level.
Served as a technical lead on Google's Gemini models alongside Jeff Dean until August 2026.