Ep 87: Gemini Co-Lead on World Models, RL's Next Domains & Continual Learning
From Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron by by Redpoint Ventures
May 22, 2026 · 60 min · Episode 87
About this episode
Oriol Vinyals discusses the future of AI, world models, and reinforcement learning with Jacob Effron.
Oriol Vinyals, VP of Research at Google DeepMind and co-lead of the Gemini program, joins Jacob the day after Google I/O to unpack the research underpinning Google's latest announcements and where frontier AI is heading. The conversation moves from world models (why Google has uniquely bet on them as a path to AGI, what the "GPT moment" for video and images would look like, and how they connect to robotics and simulation) to agents (the Spark release, why the system and model need to be optimized jointly, and why scaffolding will eventually be written by models themselves). Oriol gets into the mechanics of memory in models, drawing on his cognitive neuroscience background to argue that file-system-style non-parametric memory is more practical than baking memory into weights at serving scale. He shares his views on the limits of RL today (LLMs are data-limited in a way that game-playing RL never was), why training on narrow domains like math and code generalizes surprisingly well, and what a true "Move 37" moment for science or ML research would look like. Throughout, he reflects on the unique advantages of being inside Google (TPU co-design, end-to-end revenue stability, the…
People in this episode
Host: Jacob Effron
Guest: Oriol Vinyals
Topics covered
- world models
- reinforcement learning
- AGI
- cognitive neuroscience
- memory in models
- AI research
Keywords
- Gemini
- AGI
- RL
- memory
- cognitive neuroscience
- Google I/O
- Spark release
- Move 37
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: Google DeepMind, Google, TPU, Brain, DeepMind
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