Who Is This Person? Even Hassabis Stepped Aside: Koray Kavukcuoglu Takes Over Google DeepMind

Koray Kavukcuoglu, a Turkish researcher born in 1980, initially studied aerospace engineering before switching to computer science and earning his PhD under Yann LeCun at NYU. He joined DeepMind in 2012, where he built the deep learning team and co-created DQN, an AI system that learned to play Atari games, a landmark work in deep reinforcement learning published in Nature in 2015. He later contributed to WaveNet, a text-to-speech technology that became part of Google products, and gradually moved into management roles, becoming a research VP and CTO. In the Gemini project, he managed about 1000 people, coordinating teams from DeepMind and Google Brain, and was described as an indispensable firefighter. In June 2025, Google created the new role of Chief AI Architect for him, and now he has been promoted to SVP, reporting directly to Sundar Pichai, taking over daily operations and the Gemini team from Demis Hassabis, who becomes Chairman of DeepMind and Chief Scientist at Alphabet. This change comes amid a talent exodus, with notable departures including Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, Quoc Le, David Silver, Noam Shazeer, and John Jumper. Additionally, Gemini 3.5 Pro is still marked as coming soon on the official website, raising concerns about Google's competitive position against OpenAI and Anthropic. The appointment is seen as a bet on Koray's organizational skills to navigate these challenges.