Ex-Deepmind VP Vinyals says AI self-improvement is coming but won't trigger an intelligence explosion

Oriol Vinyals, until recently head of research at Google DeepMind, thinks a sudden AI intelligence explosion through recursive self-improvement is unlikely. AI can speed up research by a factor of ten, he says, but it hits two bottlenecks: coming up with ideas ("research taste") and reliably…

Oriol Vinyals, until recently head of research at Google DeepMind, thinks a sudden AI intelligence explosion through recursive self-improvement is unlikely. AI can speed up research by a factor of ten, he says, but it hits two bottlenecks: coming up with ideas ("research taste") and reliably judging results. Reward hacking and the speed of light add further limits. Vinyals now wants to tackle these bottlenecks with his startup Discovery Loop, co-founded with Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Quoc Le. The article Ex-Deepmind VP Vinyals says AI self-improvement is coming but won't trigger an intelligence explosion appeared first on The Decoder.

Source: The Decoder — Published September 11, 2026 at 17:57 UTC — Category: Models