Research to Reality: Benoit Schillings, Google DeepMind, VP Research (Thinking, Reasoning, Coding)
Google DeepMind VP admits dismissing vibe coding in 2018, says he was 'pretty wrong'
“I totally dismissed that. I was that's why we have programming language. English is not a programming language. Well I I guess I was pretty wrong on that front.”
Benoit Schillings, Google DeepMind VP of Research overseeing thinking, reasoning, and coding, shared the origin story of Project Pitchfork (2018) — an early Google X initiative to apply ML to code development that was internally dismissed as unnecessary. He admitted personally rejecting natural language programming at the time, a position he now concedes was wrong. His team's current mandate is building the technology that will make Gemini exceptional within a 1-month to 1-year planning horizon, with a heavy focus on coding, reasoning evolution, and reinforcement learning fundamentals.