Koray Kavukcuoglu is a computer scientist who was named senior vice president of Google DeepMind on August 5, 2026, taking over day-to-day leadership of the unit from Demis Hassabis and reporting directly to Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai. He holds the role alongside his position as chief AI architect of Google, and was Google DeepMind's chief technology officer at the time of the announcement; the announcement gave no effective date and did not say whether he vacates the chief technology officer role (Source: blog.google).
Background at DeepMind
Pichai's August 5, 2026 message to Google DeepMind staff states that Kavukcuoglu "has been at DeepMind since its early days, and over his 13 years there, he has started our deep learning team and led the way on breakthroughs like WaveNet and DQN" (Source: blog.google). He is among the authors of the 2016 Nature paper describing AlphaGo (see Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search (Silver et al., Nature, January 2016)).
He was named Google's chief AI architect in June 2025, a newly created senior vice president role, while continuing as Google DeepMind's chief technology officer (Source: semafor.com).
Role at Google DeepMind
In the August 2026 reorganization, Hassabis moved to chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, and Kavukcuoglu stepped up to lead the unit as senior vice president rather than under a stand-alone chief executive title. Pichai's message assigns him oversight of Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams (Source: blog.google).
Hassabis wrote in the same announcement that he and Kavukcuoglu had worked together for over thirteen years, described him as "one of the world's foremost AI experts" who "has been championing GDM's mission from day one," and said the Gemini models "are in good hands with Koray and the leads, as they have been for a while." Hassabis named the unreleased Gemini 4 in describing the unit's progress (Source: blog.google).
The leadership change was announced the same day as the departure of Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, joined by Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, to found Discovery Loop — an independent public benefit corporation automating machine-learning, science and engineering research, with Alphabet as a founding investor and cloud partner. Alphabet shares fell around 5% on the combined announcements, which landed while the next flagship Gemini model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, was months behind its original June launch target and after the departures of Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and John Jumper to Anthropic (Source: fortune.com).
Relationships
- supersedes: Demis Hassabis (in day-to-day leadership of Google DeepMind, from August 2026).
- depends-on: Google DeepMind.
- related: Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search (Silver et al., Nature, January 2016), Discovery Loop, Gemini 3 / Gemini 3 Pro.