Turkish engineer named to lead Google DeepMind

SAN FRANCISCO

Google has promoted Turkish engineer Koray Kavukçuoğlu to lead Google DeepMind as senior vice president in a reshuffle of the technology giant’s artificial intelligence leadership.

Kavukçuoğlu, who had served as DeepMind’s chief technology officer and Google’s chief AI architect, will retain his company-wide architect role and report directly to Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

He will oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, the Gemini app and teams working with developers.

Pichai said Kavukçuoğlu had spent 13 years at DeepMind, where he established its deep learning team and led work on breakthroughs including WaveNet and Deep Q-Network (DQN).

“I look forward to seeing him lead [Google DeepMind] into this next chapter,” Pichai said.

As part of the changes, DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis will hand over his day-to-day operational responsibilities and become chair of Google DeepMind and chief scientist at Alphabet.

Hassabis will continue to lead Isomorphic Labs and advise DeepMind teams on AI models and research.