Koray Kavukcuoglu headshot

KORAY KAVUKCUOGLU

Chief Technology Officer
Google DeepMind
AI Deep Learning
2025 TOP 30 EMEA CTOs 2025

Career History

Google DeepMind is Google's leading AI research lab, focused on developing advanced, human-like intelligence by using deep reinforcement learning with an interdisciplinary approach. In June 2025, Koray Kavukcuoglu was given the senior vice president position of Chief AI Architect to add to his existing role of CTO of Google DeepMind, where he will lead the integration of AI models into all Google products. This expands upon the work he was already doing since 2024 as CTO to bring DeepMind into the broader Google organisation.

Before becoming CTO, Kayukcuoglu oversaw the merging of the Google DeepMind and Brain teams to form the combined Google DeepMind organisation in 2023. He has been instrumental in a number of projects at Google DeepMind since joining as a fresh PhD graduate in 2012, including AlphaGo (an AI designed to beat the world’s best GO players), AlphaFold (predicting fold patterns in protein structures) and WaveNet (natural language processing and generation at the heart of Google Assistant). This research led to the publishing of a number of academic papers.

Kavukcuoglu has a BS and MS in Aerospace Engineering from Middle East Technical University, and an MS and PhD in Computer Science from New York University.

About Google DeepMind

DeepMind was originally founded by Demis Hassabis, Shane Legg (who met at UCL) and Mustafa Suleyman in November 2010, where AI models were trained on playing computer games from the 70s and 80s with an aim to create a general-purpose AI that could be useful and effective for almost anything. DeepMind was acquired by Google in early 2014 for between $400m and $650m.

Google DeepMind has been pivotal in the development and integration across all Google products of Gemini, which is Google’s family of large language models, and other generative AI tools, including its suite of text-to-models, including Imagen for images, Veo for videos, and Lyria for music.

Google DeepMind is also developing leading AI models in the fields of robotics, medicine and text-diffusion.

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