Koray Kavukcuoglu, previously Google DeepMind's Chief Technology Officer and Google's Chief AI Architect, has been named Senior Vice President of Google DeepMind, taking over its day-to-day running from Demis Hassabis. Hassabis has stepped back from the CEO role to become Alphabet’s newly created Chief Scientist. Kavukcuoglu now oversees Gemini model development, frontier AI research, and DeepMind’s app and developer teams, reporting directly to CEO Sundar Pichai while retaining his Chief AI Architect title. Born in Turkey in 1980, he completed a Bachelor’s degree in Aerospace Engineering at Middle East Technical University (METU) in Ankara in 1999, followed by a Master’s in the same field in 2003. He earned both a Master’s (2005) and a PhD (completed in January 2011) in Computer Science from New York University, studying under Yann LeCun. His thesis was titled “Learning Feature Hierarchies for Object Recognition." During his academic years, he co-developed Torch5, an early machine learning library, with collaborators Ronan Collobert and Clément Farabet. Before joining DeepMind, he worked as a research staff member at NEC Labs America within the company’s machine learning department.