Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously CTO of Google DeepMind and Chief AI Architect at Google, will now report directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. He will be responsible for Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and the Gemini applications and developer teams. This personnel change aims to shift Google DeepMind's focus from academic projects to enhancing frontier AI performance and developer tools, in response to competitive pressure from new models expected from OpenAI and Anthropic in 2026. Former CEO Demis Hassabis will transition to Chairman of the division.