Oriol Vinyals
Spanish AI researcher behind sequence-to-sequence learning, AlphaStar and Gemini
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Oriol Vinyals is a Spanish machine-learning researcher who co-invented sequence-to-sequence learning, led DeepMind’s AlphaStar, which reached grandmaster level in StarCraft II, and was co-technical lead of Google’s Gemini models until 2026, when he co-founded Discovery Loop.
Biography
Education
Vinyals studied telecommunications engineering and mathematics at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and earned his PhD at UC Berkeley.
Google Brain
At Google Brain he co-wrote the 2014 sequence-to-sequence paper with Ilya Sutskever and Quoc Le, worked on image captioning and with Geoffrey Hinton on knowledge distillation.
AlphaStar
At DeepMind he led AlphaStar, which in 2019 reached the top grandmaster level in StarCraft II, a game he had played competitively in Spain.
Gemini
He became co-technical lead of Gemini with Jeff Dean and Noam Shazeer, until August 2026, when he co-founded the AI research start-up Discovery Loop.
Timeline
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2013
PhD from UC Berkeley
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2014
Seq2seq paper
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2016
Joins DeepMind
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2019
AlphaStar
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2023
Gemini co-lead
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2026
Co-founds Discovery Loop
Notable works
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2014
Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks Paper
With Sutskever and Le.
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2015
Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network Paper
With Hinton and Dean.
Did you know?
-
1
He was a top StarCraft player as a teenager in Spain.
-
2
MIT Technology Review named him an Innovator Under 35.
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3
He co-wrote the knowledge-distillation paper.
Connections
Frequently asked
Who is Oriol Vinyals?
Oriol Vinyals is a Spanish machine-learning researcher who co-invented sequence-to-sequence learning, led DeepMind’s AlphaStar, which reached grandmaster level in StarCraft II, and was co-technical lead of Google’s Gemini models until 2026, when he co-founded Discovery Loop.
Where is Oriol Vinyals from?
Oriol Vinyals was born in Sabadell, Spain.
What is Oriol Vinyals known for?
Oriol Vinyals is best known for Sequence-to-sequence learning; AlphaStar; co-technical lead of Gemini; Discovery Loop.
References
- Oriol Vinyals — Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
- Official website. research.google.com. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
- Oriol Vinyals (Q47030267) — structured data. Wikidata. Retrieved 4 November 2026.
Includes material from the Wikipedia article “Oriol Vinyals”, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. That text is available under the same licence. Learn more
External links
About this profile
- Researched by the TrackFame editorial team; reviewed by Sanjay Sokal under our editorial policy
- First published 4 November 2026
- Last updated
Cite this page
“Oriol Vinyals.” TrackFame, last updated 5 November 2026. https://trackfame.com/person/oriol-vinyals
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