Ioannis Antonoglou, Reflection AI: From NTUA to DeepMind and the Next Generation of AI Agents

When you dream of something, you shouldn’t ask if it can work - but how you can make it work.

In this episode of Outliers Podcast, Ioannis Antonoglou, Co-Founder, President & CTO of Reflection AI and former senior AI researcher at DeepMind, shares his journey from Athens to one of the world’s leading AI labs - and how this experience now shapes his work building the next generation of intelligent systems.

Ioannis’ path began at the National Technical University of Athens, where he explored robotics, cognition, and intelligent control. His academic trajectory continued at the University of Edinburgh and later at UCL, where his PhD work bridged neuroscience with machine learning - an early attempt to understand how biological intelligence can inspire artificial systems. This curiosity eventually led him to DeepMind, joining a team focused on one of the most ambitious questions in science:

How do we build systems that learn and reason like the human brain?

At DeepMind, he experienced a unique research culture:

• long-term, foundational research • freedom to explore deep intellectual questions • multidisciplinary teams working toward AGI

He reflects on major milestones such as AlphaGo, AlphaZero, and AlphaFold, which showed how Reinforcement Learning and scalable learning systems can solve problems once thought impossible.

Today, Ioannis continues this mission from a new vantage point - as Co-Founder, President & CTO of Reflection AI, where he and his team explore how intelligent agents can learn, generalize, and interact with the world more effectively.

But the challenges remain immense: • the complexity of real-world intelligence • the need for patience in long-horizon research • the ethical implications of advanced AI systems

For Giannis, the motivation has never changed: curiosity. A drive to understand intelligence - and push the boundaries of what is possible. His message to the next generation of engineers and scientists?

Stay curious. Dive deep. Ask big questions. Follow the threads that fascinate you. Greek researchers are shaping breakthroughs around the world - and Ioannis is one of the best examples of what is possible.

Curious to hear the full conversation?