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Gemini pins all hopes of a comeback on this person
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- DeepHorus
Google's AI field has experienced a major personnel earthquake. Nobel laureate and DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis voluntarily handed over daily operational power and became chairman, while his successor is a relatively unknown Turkish scientist, Koray Kavukcuoglu. On the day of the announcement, parent company Alphabet's stock fell 4%, and the market was full of questions about the new leader.
As Hassabis stepped down after his success, Google veteran Jeff Dean also left to start a business, taking three top technical talents with him. Google's AI department is facing restructuring. Koray previously served as Vice President of Research at DeepMind and later as Chief AI Architect, reporting directly to CEO Pichai. His promotion marks Google's acceleration of AI R&D and product integration.
Koray is 49 years old. He studied aerospace engineering at Middle East Technical University in Turkey for his bachelor's and master's degrees, and worked at missile manufacturer Roketsan. Later, he moved to the United States with his wife, studied under Yann LeCun, one of the three giants of deep learning, at New York University, and embarked on a path of AI research. He joined DeepMind in 2012 and has been rising rapidly since.
His academic achievements are remarkable, with over 345,000 citations and an h-index of 90. He is a co-corresponding author of the Nature cover paper "Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning," which laid the foundation for the DQN algorithm and is considered the ancestor of AI agents. He also participated in projects such as WaveNet and AlphaGo, driving breakthroughs in deep learning in speech and board game domains.
Within DeepMind, Koray is known as a "master of settling things." He manages 21 direct reports and holds budget and personnel approval authority over a team of about 2,100 people. Employees describe him as being able to phrase a rejection so well that it feels like a gain. He coordinates research, products, and computing resources, making him the de facto operator of Google AI.
Last June, he was appointed Chief AI Architect with the task of integrating Gemini into all Google products. He integrated multiple teams including Search and moved from London to Mountain View. Meta tried to poach him but failed. Now he has officially taken over as CEO, reporting directly to Pichai.
Unlike Hassabis, who focuses on the long-term vision of AGI, Koray pays more attention to model benchmarks and product experience. He once admitted in an interview that humans have not yet mastered the formula for creating AGI. Analysts believe his promotion indicates that Google will focus on the practical implementation of AI products, and Gemini will become the infrastructure covering all scenarios such as search, office, and cloud computing.
