Artificial Intelligence
DeepMind chief wants earlier Gemini 4 release
Koray Kavukcuoglu said Gemini 4 was in early post-training and could arrive before year-end, while Google’s AI unit was being recast around faster product work, internal use and rivals.
- Koray Kavukcuoglu said Gemini 4 was in early post-training and wanted it released before the end of the year.
- He said Google was still working on safeguards and safety testing, and engineers were already using the model in Antigravity.
- He took over Google Deepmind in August after Demis Hassabis stepped down as chief executive and became chair and Alphabet chief scientist.
- The article said Gemini 3.5 Pro had been announced for June but did not arrive, while Google had since shipped Gemini 3.1 and smaller Flash models.
Kavukcuoglu made his first media appearance as head of Google Deepmind at The Information’s AI Agenda Live Summit. He said Gemini 4 was still in an early post-training phase and that Google hoped to release it before the end of the year.
He said the company was still doing safeguards and safety testing. Engineers were already using the model inside Antigravity, and he said faster follow-up versions would come after the first release.
Kavukcuoglu also said the question of whether Google had reached AGI was not the main one. He said the focus should be on building agents that could be trusted, which differed from Demis Hassabis’s earlier emphasis on AGI.
The article said Google had announced Gemini 3.5 Pro for a June release, but it did not arrive. It also said Google had shipped Gemini 3.1 and smaller Flash models since Gemini 3, while OpenAI and Anthropic had moved ahead with their own model lines.
It said several researchers had left Google Deepmind for OpenAI and Anthropic, and that Jeff Dean had founded Discovery Loop with other former Google researchers. The piece also said Google had started selling TPUs directly to customers and that this put it closer to competing with Nvidia.
Named in this story
People
- Koray Kavukcuoglu
- head of Google Deepmind and speaker on Gemini 4
- Demis Hassabis
- Kavukcuoglu’s predecessor who stepped down as chief executive
- Sundar Pichai
- announced Gemini 3.5 Pro at I/O for a June release
- Dario Amodei
- Anthropic’s chief executive who called for slower frontier progress
- Noam Shazeer
- former Deepmind researcher who left for OpenAI in June
- John Jumper
- AlphaFold Nobel laureate who said he was joining Anthropic
- Jeff Dean
- former Google executive who founded Discovery Loop
Companies
- Alphabet
- Google’s parent company and Hassabis’s other employer as chief scientist
- the company developing Gemini and selling TPUs directly to customers
- OpenAI
- rival that had been rolling out GPT-6 and hiring former Deepmind staff
- Anthropic
- rival that had hired former Deepmind staff and updated its model line
- Nvidia
- chipmaker that Google was closer to competing with through TPU sales
- Discovery Loop
- startup founded by Jeff Dean with other former Google researchers
Organisations
- Google Deepmind
- Google’s AI unit that Kavukcuoglu now runs day to day
Products and systems
- Gemini 4
- the upcoming model that was in early post-training
- Antigravity
- Google’s coding tool that was already using the model internally
- Gemini 3.5 Pro
- the model that missed its planned release
- GPT-6
- OpenAI’s model line cited as moving ahead
- TPUs
- Google’s tensor processing units that were sold directly to customers
How the source tells it
The piece is written in a heavily framed, opinionated register that mixes reported facts with urgency, rivalry and decline language.
- urgency compressed release timing and repeated emphasis on getting the model out early
- competitive pressure constant comparison with rivals and catch-up language around model progress
- decline and drift language about a lab moving from research to product work and losing staff
- speculation as fact authorial conclusions presented as settled from selective sourcing and inference