Oriol Vinyals

Spanish computer scientist who was a vice president of research at Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMind, prop. n.: Google's main artificial intelligence laboratory, formed in 2023 by joining DeepMind and Google Brain. It builds the Gemini models and scientific AI systems such as AlphaFold. and a technical co-lead of its GeminiGemini, prop. n.: Google's family of AI models and its chatbot assistant, launched in December 2023. Gemini models handle text, images, audio and video and power many Google products. models until August 2026, when he left Google to co-found Discovery Loop, a company aiming to automate scientific discovery, with Jeff DeanJeff Dean, prop. n.: An American computer scientist who built much of Google's computing infrastructure, co-founded the Google Brain deep-learning team and was Google's chief scientist before leaving in 2026 to co-found a startup., Sanjay Ghemawat and Quoc Le. After a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley (2013), he joined Google BrainGoogle Brain, prop. n.: Google's deep-learning research team from 2011 to 2023, where the transformer — the design behind today's chatbots — and the TensorFlow software were created., where he co-introduced sequence-to-sequence learningsequence-to-sequence model, n.: A model that turns one sequence into another, such as a French sentence into English or speech into text, by first reading the whole input and then writing the output step by step. (2014, with Ilya SutskeverIlya Sutskever, prop. n.: A Russian-born Israeli-Canadian computer scientist who co-built the AlexNet image recognizer, helped found OpenAI and lead its research until 2024, and now heads the startup Safe Superintelligence Inc. and Quoc Le), the Show and Tell image captioningimage captioning, n.: Having a computer write a short description of a picture, such as 'a dog catching a frisbee in a park', to help blind people, search engines and other AI systems. model (2015), pointer networks (2015) and, with Geoffrey HintonGeoffrey Hinton, prop. n.: A British-Canadian scientist whose decades of persistent work on brain-inspired neural networks laid the foundations of modern AI; often called a 'godfather of AI', he now warns publicly about its dangers. and Dean, knowledge distillationknowledge distillation, n.: Training a smaller or cheaper 'student' AI to copy the behavior of a larger 'teacher' AI, so the student keeps much of the teacher's skill while being faster to run.. At DeepMind from 2016 he co-authored matching networks for few-shot learningfew-shot learning, n.: Getting an AI system to handle a new task or recognize a new kind of thing from just a handful of examples, the way a person can learn a new word after hearing it once or twice. (2016), WaveNetWaveNet, prop. n.: A DeepMind model that generates speech and other sounds one tiny audio sample at a time, producing voices far more natural than earlier computer speech. and the VQ-VAEVQ-VAE, n.: A network that compresses an image or sound into a short list of entries from a learned 'codebook' — like describing a picture with a fixed set of tiles — which other models can then generate., and led AlphaStarAlphaStar, prop. n.: A DeepMind AI that learned to play the real-time strategy game StarCraft II well enough to reach its highest public rank, Grandmaster, in 2019., which in 2019 reached Grandmaster level in the real-time strategy game StarCraft II, ranking above 99.8 percent of officially ranked human players, a milestone for deep reinforcement learningdeep reinforcement learning, n.: Reinforcement learning in which a large neural network does the learning, letting an AI learn tasks such as video games or robot control directly from raw inputs like screen pixels or camera images. combining imitation learningimitation learning, n.: Teaching an AI by showing it examples of an expert doing a task, so it learns to copy the behavior instead of discovering it through trial and error. with multi-agent self-playself-play, n.: Training an AI by having it play against copies of itself, so it always has an opponent at its own level and can keep improving without human examples..