How Google’s New AI Architect Plans to Spread Gemini Everywhere
Koray Kavukcuoglu’s success as Google’s chief AI fixer nabbed him a major promotion in June. Now he just has to fend off talent raids from Meta and inject AI into all Google products.
When Google’s billionaire co-founder, Sergey Brin, needs something done at the company’s artificial intelligence unit—AI chips allocated to a team, a researcher hired, an employee moved to a new department—there’s one person he messages: Koray Kavukcuoglu.
Kavukcuoglu isn’t Google’s flashiest AI leader, though he’s the chief technology officer of its AI unit, Google DeepMind, and the chief AI architect for the entire company. He lacks the celebrity of Brin and the Nobel Prize of Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind and one of Kavukcuoglu’s bosses.
But over the past two years, Kavukcuoglu has developed into the indispensable fixer for Google’s AI models, including the tricky business of managing the big egos at Google DeepMind, according to interviews with nine current and former Google employees who have worked with him directly. Kavukcuoglu (pronounced Kah-vuk-choe-loo) has helped oversee a remarkable turnaround at Google, during which its Gemini models have gone from also-rans to the top of industry leaderboards.
