Ex-DeepMind research head Vinyals: AI self-improvement won't spark an explosion
The Decoder · rss · 2026-09-12
Oriol Vinyals, until recently head of research at Google DeepMind, thinks a sudden intelligence explosion via recursive self-improvement is unlikely. AI could speed up research 10x, but hits two bottlenecks: 'research taste' for generating ideas, and reliably judging results; reward hacking and the speed of light add further limits. He co-founded startup Discovery Loop with Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat and Quoc Le to tackle exactly these bottlenecks.
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