Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously DeepMind's CTO and Google's chief AI architect, has been promoted to Senior Vice President of DeepMind, reporting directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. He replaces Demis Hassabis as head of the unit; Hassabis moves to chair. Kavukcuoglu will oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. Google has not released a frontier model since early 2026, falling behind OpenAI (GPT-5.6) and Anthropic (Mythos) on performance benchmarks.
Kavukcuoglu's promotion signals a shift from Hassabis's focus on multimodal, world models, and health research toward execution-focused LLM development and product releases. Google created an internal 'Code Strike' team to bolster coding capabilities, a key differentiator; Anthropic and OpenAI are "miles ahead" in this domain. Analysts expect Kavukcuoglu to prioritize shipping Gemini 3.5 Pro—whose release was delayed in July to improve coding performance—and establishing a faster, predictable release cadence.
Kavukcuoglu, who joined DeepMind in 2012 before Google's 2014 acquisition, inherits departures of high-profile researchers and engineering talent. His near-term challenge is to 'rebuild the coding and pretraining expertise that walked out the door' while maintaining momentum against better-positioned competitors. The reshuffle underscores Google's struggle to keep pace at the frontier as coding becomes the defining battleground for AGI.