The headlines went to the man who left. The more telling name is the one who stayed. Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google DeepMind’s technology chief, now runs the lab day to day and reports straight to chief executive Sundar Pichai. He inherits what Hassabis is giving up: control of Gemini, and with it Google’s standing in the AI race.
Last week Google said Hassabis, DeepMind’s founder and a Nobel laureate, would step back from running the lab to become its chair and Alphabet’s chief scientist. That was the announcement. The shift beneath it is geographic. Google is pulling its AI leadership out of London and concentrating it in California.
The engineer who now holds Gemini
Kavukcuoglu is not an outsider. He has spent 13 years at DeepMind, started its deep learning team, and led the work behind WaveNet and DQN. Turkish-born, he studied under Yann LeCun at New York University. LeCun calls him a great engineer who built rare research-management skills on the way up.
He moved to Mountain View in the past year, and oversight of Gemini moved with him. He is now the only one of Gemini’s co-leads still at Google. He also loses his old reporting line to Hassabis and answers to Pichai alone. In Google’s bureaucracy, that is the real promotion. Some now tip him to succeed Pichai one day.
