Koray Kavukcuoglu on frontier models, coding agents, and building AGI
Google DeepMind's CTO declares frontier AI leadership its only goal, confirms Gemini 4 progress
“there's nothing other than being at the frontier that is important for us”
Koray Kavukcuoglu, leading Google DeepMind's frontier AI efforts, made an unusually direct public statement that being at the frontier is Google DeepMind's singular goal, pushing back on recent perception that Google's models lag behind competitors. He confirmed Gemini 4 is underway as their 'most ambitious pre-training run' yet and framed the Gemini 3.x series improvements as coming from deeply understanding the model-to-agent transition in software engineering. The explicit AGI-building framing and frontier-at-all-costs declaration signals a more aggressive competitive posture from Google DeepMind leadership.