Ex-Deepmind VP Vinyals says AI self-improvement is coming but won't trigger an intelligence explosion
Ex-DeepMind research VP Oriol Vinyals says recursive self-improvement is coming but slow, and co-founds Discovery Loop with Jeff Dean to automate research.
Oriol Vinyals, former VP of Research at Google DeepMind who worked on AlphaStar, AlphaCode, and Gemini, argued at Agentic AI Summit 2026 that recursive self-improvement will progress gradually without an intelligence explosion. He identifies idea generation ('research taste') and evaluation as the two biggest bottlenecks, noting benchmarks like SWE-Bench Pro and ML-Bench mostly test the already-working steps and suffer from overfitting and scheming. He is co-founding Discovery Loop with Jeff Dean as CEO, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Quoc Le to automate the full research cycle, starting with AI research.