Oriol Vinyals: DeepMind AlphaStar, StarCraft, and Language | Lex Fridman Podcast #20

The following is a conversation with Ariel Viñales. He's a senior research scientist at Google DeepMind, and before that, he was at Google Brain and Berkeley. His research has been cited over 39,000 times. He's truly one of the most brilliant and impactful minds in the field of deep learning. He's behind some of the biggest papers and ideas in AI, including sequence-to-sequence learning, audio generation, image captioning, neural machine translation, and of course, reinforcement learning. He's a lead researcher of the AlphaStar project, creating an agent that defeated a top professional at the game of StarCraft. This conversation is part of the Artificial Intelligence podcast. If you enjoy it, subscribe on YouTube, iTunes, or simply connect with me on Twitter @lexfridman, spelled F-R-I-D. And now here's my conversation with Ariel Viñales. You spearheaded the DeepMind team behind AlphaStar that recently beat a, uh, top professional player at StarCraft. So, you have an incredible wealth of work in deep learning and a bunch of fields, but let's talk about StarCraft first. Let's go back to the very beginning, even before AlphaStar, before DeepMind, before deep learning. First, what came, uh, first for you, a love for programming or a love for video games?

I think for me, it definitely came first the drive to play video games. I really liked computers. I didn't really code much, but what I would do is I would just mess with the computer, break it and fix it. That was the level of skills, I guess, that I gained in my very early days, I mean, when I was 10 or 11. Um, and then I- I really got into video games, especially StarCraft, actually, the first version. I spent most of my time just playing kind of pseudo-professionally, as professionally as you could play back in '98 in Europe, which was not a very main scene like the- what's called nowadays eSports.

Right. Of course, in the '90s. So, uh, how'd you get into StarCraft? What- what was your favorite race? How- how do you develop- how did you develop your skill? What- what was your strategy? All that kind of thing.

So as a player, I tended to try to play not many games, not to kind of disclose the strategies that I kind of developed, and I like to play random, actually. Not in competitions, but just to... I- I think in StarCraft there's, well, there's three main races, and I found it very useful to play with all of them. Um, so I would choose random many times, even sometimes in tournaments to gain skill on the three races, because it's not how you play against someone, but also if you understand the race because you play it, you also understand what's annoying, what... Then when you're on the other side, what to do to annoy that person, to try to gain advantages here and there and so on. So, I actually played random. Although I must say, in terms of favorite race, I really like Zerg. Um, I was probably best at Zerg, um, and that's probably what I tend to use towards the end of my career before starting university.