Google DeepMind Leadership Restructuring: Koray Kavukcuoglu to Lead AI Operations

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced a major leadership restructuring across Google DeepMind on Tuesday aimed at accelerating its artificial general intelligence roadmap. Koray Kavukcuoglu will become senior vice president of Google DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai and leading Gemini model development, frontier research and developer ecosystems. Co-founder Demis Hassabis transitions to chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet, stepping back from daily operations to focus on long-term AGI strategy and Isomorphic Labs. Hassabis said he decided now is the right time to hand over day-to-day operational responsibilities to focus on the big picture. He added that the Gemini models are in good hands with Kavukcuoglu. Kavukcuoglu previously served as chief technology officer of Google DeepMind and chief AI architect at Google, bringing 13 years of leadership at DeepMind. Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean and Google Senior Fellow Sanjay Ghemawat are departing after 27 years to launch an independent public benefit corporation focused on machine learning systems and scientific discovery. Google will be a founding investor and cloud partner for the new venture. Pichai said Dean and Ghemawat helped drive significant technology transitions and Google will continue to collaborate on a research framework for ML systems. The company also disclosed that the Gemini app active user base crossed 950 million monthly users and the Gemma model family passed 900 million downloads.