Google DeepMind has appointed longtime artificial intelligence researcher Koray Kavukcuoglu as its Chief AI Architect, expanding his responsibilities as Google accelerates the development and deployment of its Gemini models across products and enterprise services.
Kavukcuoglu, who has been with DeepMind since 2012, will oversee the technical direction of Google's AI systems while continuing to work closely with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis. The appointment puts one of DeepMind's earliest researchers in a central position as the company develops increasingly capable multimodal and agentic AI models.
The executive joined DeepMind during its early years and has worked across several of its major research programmes. His background includes deep learning, reinforcement learning and the development of large-scale AI systems. Before joining DeepMind, Kavukcuoglu completed his PhD at New York University, where he worked with AI researcher Yann LeCun.
Over more than a decade at DeepMind, Kavukcuoglu has contributed to the organisation's transition from a research-focused AI laboratory into the core AI unit supporting Google's broader product ecosystem. He previously served as Vice President of Research and later as Chief Technology Officer at Google DeepMind.
His responsibilities have included overseeing research and engineering work behind Google's Gemini family of AI models. Gemini has become a central part of Google's AI strategy, with the technology being integrated across products including Search, Workspace, Android and Google Cloud.
The appointment comes as Google DeepMind increasingly focuses on turning advances in foundation models into AI systems capable of reasoning, coding, understanding multiple forms of media and completing tasks through agents. The company is also developing models for scientific applications, robotics and other areas beyond consumer-facing generative AI.
Kavukcuoglu has previously spoken about the importance of combining long-term AI research with the engineering required to deploy models at scale. His expanded role places him at the intersection of those two areas as Google works to move new AI capabilities from research into products used by consumers, developers and businesses.
Google DeepMind was formally created in 2023 through the combination of DeepMind and Google's Brain research team. Since then, the unit has become the centre of Google's foundation model development, including Gemini and several scientific AI projects.
As Chief AI Architect, Kavukcuoglu will now have a wider role in shaping how these technologies are developed and incorporated across Google's AI portfolio as competition among major technology companies continues to intensify.
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