Koray Kavukcuoglu

Turkish-born computer scientist who in August 2026 became senior vice president of Google DeepMindGoogle DeepMind, prop. n.: Google's main artificial intelligence laboratory, formed in 2023 by joining DeepMind and Google Brain. It builds the Gemini models and scientific AI systems such as AlphaFold., reporting to Google's chief executive Sundar Pichai and overseeing Gemini model development, frontier research and the Gemini app and developer teams. During a doctorate with Yann LeCunYann LeCun, prop. n.: A French-American computer scientist who pioneered the neural networks that recognize images, led Meta's AI research for over a decade, and argues that chatbots alone will not reach human-level AI. at New York University on learning visual features with sparse coding and convolutional networks, he co-developed the Torch7 machine-learning library (2011), a forerunner of PyTorchPyTorch, prop. n.: The most widely used free software toolkit for building and training neural networks, especially in research; programmers write ordinary Python and it handles the calculus and the graphics chips.. Joining DeepMind in its early years, he led its deep-learning research and co-authored many of the lab's landmark papers, including the deep Q-networkdeep Q-network, n.: A method, made famous by DeepMind in 2013–2015, in which a neural network learned to play dozens of Atari video games from screen pixels and the score alone, many at human level. (2013–2015), spatial transformer networks (2015), the PixelRNN and PixelCNN models that established autoregressive image generationautoregressive image generation, n.: Making a picture one piece at a time, each piece predicted from those already made — the way chatbots write text word by word. (2016), WaveNetWaveNet, prop. n.: A DeepMind model that generates speech and other sounds one tiny audio sample at a time, producing voices far more natural than earlier computer speech. (2016), A3CA3C, abbr.: A 2016 DeepMind training method in which many copies of an AI agent learn in parallel on separate copies of a task, pooling their updates into one shared neural network. (2016) and the VQ-VAEVQ-VAE, n.: A network that compresses an image or sound into a short list of entries from a learned 'codebook' — like describing a picture with a fixed set of tiles — which other models can then generate. (2017). As vice president of research and later chief technology officer of Google DeepMind he oversaw much of its work on GeminiGemini, prop. n.: Google's family of AI models and its chatbot assistant, launched in December 2023. Gemini models handle text, images, audio and video and power many Google products.; in 2025 Google named him its chief AI architect, and in 2026 he took over day-to-day leadership of the lab when Demis HassabisDemis Hassabis, prop. n.: A British AI researcher and former chess prodigy who co-founded DeepMind, led the teams behind AlphaGo and AlphaFold, and shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. became its chair and Alphabet's chief scientist.