Oriol Vinyals Explained

Oriol Vinyals
Birth Place:	Sabadell, Catalonia, Spain
Workplaces:	Google DeepMind
Education:	Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya University of California, San Diego University of California, Berkeley
Doctoral Advisor:	Nelson Morgan
Thesis Title:	Beyond Deep Learning: Scalable Methods and Models for Learning
Thesis Url:	https://escholarship.org/content/qt7zz1t65j/qt7zz1t65j_noSplash_1ae071301d3c7cd495d63db56bc7d684.pdf?t=ny5x8v
Thesis Year:	2013
Known For:	seq2seq AlphaStar

Oriol Vinyals (born 1983) is a Spanish machine learning researcher at DeepMind.^{[1] [2]} He is currently technical lead on Gemini, along with Noam Shazeer and Jeff Dean.

Education and career

Vinyals was born in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.^[3] He studied mathematics and telecommunication engineering at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.^[4] He then moved to the US and studied for a Master's degree in computer science at University of California, San Diego, and at University of California, Berkeley, where he received his PhD in 2013 under Nelson Morgan in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.^[5]

Vinyals co-invented the seq2seq model for machine translation along with Ilya Sutskever and Quoc Viet Le.^[6] He led AlphaStar research group at DeepMind, which applies artificial intelligence to computer games such as StarCraft II.^[7]

In 2016, he was chosen by the magazine MIT Technology Review as one of the 35 most innovative young people under 35.^{[8] [9]}

By 2022 he was a principal research scientist at DeepMind.^[10] His research in DeepMind is regularly featured in the mainstream media^{[11] [12] [13]} As of August 2024, he is currently technical lead on Gemini, along with Noam Shazeer and Jeff Dean.^[14]

See also

• Ilya Sutskever

Notes and References

1. Web site: Pascual . Manuel G. . 2022-12-03 . Oriol Vinyals: "Nuestra generación verá una inteligencia artificial que iguale o supere a la del ser humano" . 2023-04-04 . El País . es.
2. Web site: Oriol Vinyals – Google Research . 2022-08-01 . Google Research . en.
3. Web site: 9. Oriol Vinyals: Sequence-to-Sequence Machine Learning - The Future of Machine Intelligence [Book] ]. 2022-07-31 . www.oreilly.com . en.
4. Web site: Garro . Juan . Oriol Vinyals, el español detrás del último éxito de DeepMind: una IA capaz de arrollar a dos profesionales de Starcraft II . Xataka . es . 17 March 2019.
5. Web site: Vinyals . Oriol . Tech Reports EECS at UC Berkeley . eecs.berkeley.edu . December 12, 2013.
6. Sutskever . Ilya . Vinyals . Oriol . Le . Quoc V . 2014 . Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks . Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems . Curran Associates, Inc. . 27. 1409.3215 .
7. Vinyals . Oriol . Babuschkin . Igor . Czarnecki . Wojciech M. . Mathieu . Michaël . Dudzik . Andrew . Chung . Junyoung . Choi . David H. . Powell . Richard . Ewalds . Timo . Georgiev . Petko . Oh . Junhyuk . 2019-11-14 . Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning . Nature . en . 575 . 7782 . 350–354 . 10.1038/s41586-019-1724-z . 31666705 . 2019Natur.575..350V . 204972004 . 0028-0836.
8. Web site: Pérez . Rocío . El ingeniero español elegido por el MIT entre los innovadores jóvenes del año . elconfidencial . es . 24 August 2016.
9. Web site: Oriol Vinyals . 2022-07-31 . MIT Technology Review . en.
10. News: 2022-02-02 . DeepMind AI rivals average human competitive coder . en-GB . BBC News . 2023-04-04.
11. Web site: Vincent . James . 2022-02-02 . DeepMind says its new AI coding engine is as good as an average human programmer . 2023-04-04 . The Verge . en-US.
12. Web site: Staff . Ars . 2016-11-25 . Google DeepMind could invent the next generation of AI by playing Starcraft 2 . 2023-04-04 . Ars Technica . en-us.
13. News: 2017-11-23 . Google brain connects his StarCraft past with AI future . Financial Times . 2023-04-04.
14. Web site: Cai . Kenrick . Google appoints former Character.AI founder as co-lead of its AI models . reuters . August 22, 2024.