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U.S. technology titan Google has named Turkish AI executive Koray Kavukcuoglu to lead its Google DeepMind unit, putting him in charge of Gemini model development and the company's frontier AI research.
The company announced the changes on Wednesday, naming DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis chairman of Google DeepMind and chief scientist at parent company Alphabet.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said Hassabis will focus on shaping the future of artificial general intelligence (AGI) and scientific discovery in his new position.
Pichai pointed to strong demand for Gemini models, saying the Gemini app has grown to more than 950 million monthly users while the company continues to invest in frontier AI research.
Kavukcuoglu, who previously served as Google DeepMind's chief technology officer and chief AI architect, will now oversee Gemini model development, frontier AI research, the Gemini app and developer teams.
The CEO described Kavukcuoglu as a globally recognized AI expert who has spent 13 years at DeepMind, where he founded the company's deep learning team and led breakthroughs including WaveNet and DQN.
"Koray 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," Pichai wrote. "I look forward to seeing him lead GDM into this next chapter."
Born in Türkiye, Kavukcuoglu studied aerospace engineering at Middle East Technical University before earning master's and doctoral degrees in computer science at New York University under pioneering AI researcher Yann LeCun.
He joined DeepMind in 2012 after working at NEC Laboratories America and has co-authored several landmark AI papers.
In 2025, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai appointed him as Google's first Chief AI Architect, giving him responsibility for accelerating the integration of Gemini models across the company's products while continuing to lead DeepMind's technical strategy.
Google DeepMind is Alphabet's artificial intelligence research division, created in 2023 by merging Google's Google Brain team with London-based AI lab DeepMind.
The unit develops the company's flagship AI models, including the Gemini family of large language models that power Google's AI features across Search, Android, Workspace and Cloud services.
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