Koray Kavukcuoglu

Koray Kavukcuoglu is an artificial intelligence researcher and executive who serves as Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind and Chief AI Architect at Google. In August 2026, he assumed day-to-day leadership of Google DeepMind, with responsibility for Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini app and developer teams. ^{[5] [6]}

Education

Kavukcuoglu studied aerospace engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU), where he completed undergraduate and graduate studies. His 2003 master's thesis examined wing flutter analysis. He later completed a PhD in Computer Science at New York University under Yann LeCun. His dissertation, Learning Feature Hierarchies for Object Recognition, was submitted in January 2011. ^{[11] [12] [13]}

Career

In June 2025, Kavukcuoglu was appointed Google’s Chief AI Architect, a newly created senior vice president role reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai. The role was established to accelerate the integration of Google’s Gemini models across the company’s products, while Kavukcuoglu continued serving as Chief Technology Officer of Google DeepMind. ^{[2] [9]}

In August 2026, Kavukcuoglu became Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind and assumed its day-to-day leadership after Demis Hassabis moved to the roles of Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet. Kavukcuoglu reports directly to Pichai and oversees Gemini model development, frontier AI research, the Gemini app, and developer teams. ^{[5] [6] [7] [8]}

Kavukcuoglu joined DeepMind in 2012 as a researcher after working at NEC Laboratories America. ^{[9] [10]} He later held research leadership positions including Vice President of Research and became Chief Technology Officer of Google DeepMind. Google credits him with establishing DeepMind’s deep learning team and contributing to research associated with DQN and WaveNet. ^[5]

Before his career at Google, Kavukcuoglu was a Postdoctoral Research Scientist at New York University. His earlier industry experience includes a role as a Research Scientist at NEC Labs America, a Software and Control Engineer at Roketsan from September 2001 to September 2002, and an internship at Siemens in 2000.^[3]​