Oriol Vinyals

Career

Oriol Vinyals gained early professional experience at Microsoft Research and Google, and in 2013 joined the Google Brain team as a researcher working on machine learning and deep learning for text, speech and vision.²

Since 2016 Vinyals has been vice-president of Research and head of Deep Learning at Google DeepMind, where Vinyals was a technical co-lead of Gemini, and Google's May 2026 Gemini 3.5 announcement credits Vinyals as a Vice President at Google DeepMind.²¹

Research

In 2014 Vinyals co-authored Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks with Ilya Sutskever and Quoc V. Le, and Show and Tell, a neural image caption generator. With Geoffrey Hinton and Jeff Dean, Vinyals wrote Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network (2015), which introduced knowledge distillation, and Vinyals is a co-author of the TensorFlow white paper and of WaveNet.³⁹¹⁰⁴⁵

At DeepMind, Vinyals contributed to AlphaStar, an AI system for the video game StarCraft II, and was involved in AlphaFold. Vinyals is listed among the executive sponsors of the first Gemma report and among the sponsors of the Gemma 2 and Gemma 3 reports.²⁶⁷⁸

Work and contributions

• Gemma Open weights

  Listed among the executive sponsors in the 2024 Gemma report, which releases pretrained and fine-tuned checkpoints, and among the sponsors of the Gemma 2 and Gemma 3 technical reports.⁶⁷⁸

• TensorFlow Open-source code

  Co-author of the TensorFlow white paper, which describes the system built at Google and its open-source release under the Apache 2.0 license.⁴

• Sequence to sequence learning Published research

  Co-author of Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks (2014), which maps an input sequence to an output sequence with multilayered LSTM networks and evaluates the approach on English-to-French translation.³

• WaveNet Published research

  Co-author of the 2016 WaveNet paper on a generative model for raw audio waveforms.⁵

Timeline

1. 2013Joined the Google Brain team as a researcher.²
2. Sep 10, 2014Co-authored Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks.³
3. Nov 17, 2014Co-authored Show and Tell, a neural image caption generator.⁹
4. Mar 9, 2015Co-authored Distilling the Knowledge in a Neural Network with Geoffrey Hinton and Jeff Dean.¹⁰
5. 2016Became vice-president of Research and head of Deep Learning at Google DeepMind.²
6. Sep 12, 2016Co-authored WaveNet, a generative model for raw audio.⁵
7. Mar 13, 2024Listed among the executive sponsors of the first Gemma technical report.⁶
8. Nov 2025Received an honorary doctorate from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya.²
9. May 19, 2026Credited as Vice President, Google DeepMind, on the Gemini 3.5 announcement.¹

Other documented roles

Roles the sources document that are not confirmed as current.

• Listed with a Google affiliation on the 2014 sequence-to-sequence paper, Google³

Honors and recognition

• Honorary Doctorate · Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), 2025²
• Innovators Under 35 · MIT Technology Review, 2016¹¹²

Where they work

• Google DeepMind 64 people in the wiki

Related people

• Koray KavukcuogluAlso at Google DeepMind
• Shixiang Shane GuAlso at Google DeepMind
• Omar SansevieroAlso at Google DeepMind
• Arthur ConmyAlso at Google DeepMind
• Danqi ChenAlso at Google DeepMind
• Johannes HagemannReinforcement learning · Language models
• Ju-Chieh ChouSpeech and audio · Language models
• Lewis TunstallLanguage models · Reinforcement learning
• Hsiao-Wuen HonSpeech and audio · Language models
• Susan ZhangLanguage models · Reinforcement learning