creators

Oriol Vinyals: Discovery Loop Co-founder and CTO

Oriol Vinyals co-founded Discovery Loop in August 2026 after co-leading Gemini and AlphaStar at Google DeepMind, where he was a vice-president of research.

Oriol Vinyals, a Spanish researcher from Sabadell, in Catalonia, is co-founder and chief technology officer of Discovery Loop, a startup building systems that automate the experimental loops of machine learning, science and engineering. He announced the move on 5 August 2026, leaving Google DeepMind alongside Jeff Dean, Quoc Le and Sanjay Ghemawat, the other three founders named on the company's site. He took the double degree in telecommunications engineering and mathematics at the UPC in Barcelona, and his PhD at UC Berkeley in December 2013, supervised by Nelson Morgan. He joined Google Brain and moved to DeepMind in London in 2016. He co-wrote the 2014 sequence-to-sequence paper with Ilya Sutskever and Quoc Le, worked on distillation and WaveNet, co-led AlphaStar, whose StarCraft II agent reached grandmaster level in the Nature paper he first-authored on 30 October 2019, and co-led Gemini from version 1.0 to 3.0. He was a vice-president of research at Google DeepMind when he left. MIT Technology Review named him one of its 35 Innovators Under 35 in 2016, and the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya made him a doctor honoris causa on 26 November 2025.

Specialization

deep learning, reinforcement learning, sequence models, AI research leadership

Country

United States