DeepMind's new operational chief says frontier leadership is the only thing that matters, and admits the lab is currently behind

2026-09-01 · part of DeepMind Succession

What happened

Koray Kavukcuoglu, in his first substantive public interview since taking over Gemini/frontier research day-to-day (with Google engineer Logan Kilpatrick), said bluntly: "there's nothing other than being at the frontier that is important for us." He acknowledged current models are "a little bit below the frontier" but said the team has what it needs to close the gap, pointed to the Flash-series progression (3.5 through 3.7) as evidence of agentic progress, and revealed Gemini 3.5 Pro is running "months late." This is a direct, on-the-record answer to this thread's own open watch question — whether the Hassabis-to-Kavukcuoglu handover "reads as succession planning or a real strategy shift" — from the person now running the lab day to day. (the-decoder.com)

Sources 1

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The wider story

This event sits inside DeepMind Succession, which carries how it developed before and since.

Story 5 of 5 in this thread's timeline, oldest to newest

Adjacent threads (shared entities):

· Apple × Gemini

· Frontier Gatekeeping

· Hyperscaler Capex

· Google Capex

· Where the Capex Lands

· Compute Spend

· In-House Silicon

· Big Tech into Health

· Google Health

· Targets

· The Enterprise Agent Land Grab