Overview
- On Aug. 5 Google announced that Koray Kavukcuoglu will replace Demis Hassabis as the unit’s operational lead while Hassabis moves to a chair role, handing Kavukcuoglu day-to-day authority over Gemini.
- Kavukcuoglu will report directly to CEO Sundar Pichai and oversee Gemini model development, Frontier AI research, the Gemini app, and developer teams to better align model work with Google’s products and sales efforts.
- Internal testing found Gemini trailing competitors in key areas such as coding, which delayed the planned Gemini 3.5 Pro release by about two months and prompted the company to prioritize performance fixes.
- The reshuffle moved some teams out of DeepMind into Google’s corporate structure, coincided with the departures of high-profile engineers and the formation of Discovery Loop, and triggered a roughly 4% drop in Alphabet’s shares.
- The changes mark a clear shift from long‑horizon lab research toward faster, commercial execution; the near-term test for that shift will be whether Google can restore coding and pretraining expertise and ship a competitive Gemini update.