Google Deepmind's new chief says frontier AI leadership is the only thing that matters
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Google DeepMind's new chief, Koray Kavukcuoglu, strongly rejected speculation that Google does not care about leading the AI model race, asserting that being at the frontier is the only thing that matters. He expressed certainty that Google will reach the frontier, while admitting its current models are slightly below that level. Kavukcuoglu said the necessary team, resources, and full stack exist to close the gap, but he provided no concrete frontier news. He repeated that Gemini 4 is the most ambitious run so far and is going well, though this was already known, and gave no update on the delayed Gemini 3.5 Pro. Instead, he highlighted the rapid progress of the Flash series, describing the jump from versions 3.5 through 3.7 as a shift from a language model to a coding agent. He emphasized that software engineering is the most critical domain for AI systems to succeed in.
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