DeepMind to be led by Turk as Google shakes up AI division

Turkish-born Koray Kavukçuoğlu, a long-term Google tech executive and artificial intelligence researcher, will assume a leading role at the tech giant’s DeepMind division, taking over Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis, the company announced on Wednesday.

Google’s head of artificial intelligence, Hassabis, one of the leading experts in the field, will step down from his current role to become Google parent Alphabet’s chief scientist amid a reshuffling at DeepMind that will also include a key engineer’s departure.

Hassabis will take on two new titles, Alphabet announced on Wednesday: chair of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet.

The change “will allow me to focus on long-term strategy and accelerating scientific breakthroughs, including leaning into my work at Isomorphic to help cure disease,” Hassabis wrote in a social media post.

Isomorphic Labs is an AI-powered drug discovery lab that spun out from DeepMind in 2021. In 2024, Hassabis won a Nobel Prize in chemistry.

On the other hand, as part of the shake-up, DeepMind’s chief technology officer (CTO) and chief AI architect, Kavukçuoğlu, will become the division’s senior vice president (SVP) and oversee its operations, including the development of Google’s flagship frontier models and products, which are known as Gemini.

“Koray will become the SVP at Google DeepMind, responsible for all aspects of model development, GDM research, and Geminiapp & dev teams. Koray has been at GDM for 13 years and is a world-renowned expert in the field, starting our deep learning team and driving breakthroughs like WaveNet & DQN. GDM is in great hands!” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a post on X.

Kavukçuoğlu, in a social media post, said he was “honored to lead GDM into this new chapter.”

“This is such a pivotal moment for all of us as we double down on our Gemini models, frontier AI research, and the products we build for our users and partners,” he added.

A graduate of Middle East Technical University (METU), Kavukçuoğlu completed a master’s degree and a PhD in computer science from New York University (NYU) in 2010 under the mentorship of Yann LeCun.

Hassabis co-founded DeepMind in 2010, and four years later, Google bought the research lab for $650 million, according to reports at the time. His co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, is currently the chief of Microsoft’s AI segment.

Google is competing for customers alongside other major AI developers including Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta, as well as DeepSeek and Moonshot in China.

The industry is also chasing a theoretical milestone known as advanced general intelligence (AGI), which is a point when AI software matches the capabilities of human thinking.

“I’ve been working towards AGI my whole life and now, like many of you, I feel it is close at hand,” Hassabis wrote in Wednesday’s blog post.

“With this backdrop, I’ve decided that now is the right time for me to hand over my day-to-day operational responsibilities at (Google DeepMind), so that I have the time and space to focus on the big picture and help influence what is to come,” Hassabis continued.

Observers have been waiting for Google to announce a more powerful version of its AI model, called Gemini 3.5 Pro, which was supposed to launch in June but appears to be delayed.

Its shares closed 4% down Wednesday afternoon.

The leadership changes come amid a wider brain drain at Google.

In June, a top AI and engineering executive, Noam Shazeer, left for OpenAI, while senior researcher John Jumper, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in chemistry with Hassabis, jumped to Anthropic.

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