Vinyals launches Discovery Loop with Jeff Dean and Quoc Le

Oriol Vinyals, until recently VP of Research at Google DeepMind, spoke about recursive self-improvement at the Agentic AI Summit 2026. He expects AI systems to improve themselves, but slowly, and rules out a sudden intelligence explosion. Systems already handle the coding and experimentation steps; the real bottlenecks are generating ideas and judging results reliably. Reward hacking and the physical limits of hardware add further constraints. Vinyals plans to address both bottlenecks with Discovery Loop, a new startup whose founders include Jeff Dean as CEO, alongside Sanjay Ghemawat and Quoc Le. The company intends to automate its own AI research first, with itself as its first customer.