Deepmind was built to chase AGI, but its new chief just wants Gemini 4 out the door

Deepmind — koray Kavukcuoglu wants to release Gemini 4 well before the end of the year. He calls the AGI question, which his predecessor Demis Hassabis always focused on, “not the right conversation.” Under pressure from OpenAI and Anthropic, Google’s former research lab has become a Gemini factory.

Kavukcuoglu made his first media appearance as head of Google Deepmind at The Information’s AI Agenda Live Summit. He said Gemini 4 is in an early phase of post-training, the stage where a base model gets refined to behave reliably. He hopes to release it “much earlier” than the end of the year. “Our intention is to […] as soon as possible […] release an early post-training output because we see the results and we are excited,” Kavukcuoglu said. Fast iterations would follow. Google is still working on safeguards and safety testing. Engineers are already using the model internally for the coding tool Antigravity. Kavukcuoglu, previously CTO, took over in August after Demis Hassabis stepped down as Deepmind CEO. Hassabis now chairs the unit and serves as Alphabet’s chief scientist. Google has ground to make up after Gemini 3.5 Pro quietly vanished Gemini 4 would be Google’s first new flagship model since Gemini 3 late last year. Since then, the company has shipped the Gemini 3.1 update in February and several smaller, cheaper Flash models. CEO Sundar Pichai announced Gemini 3.5 Pro at I/O in May for a June release, but it never arrived. According to the Financial Times, the project missed three deadlines. Kavukcuoglu said Google took “a little bit of a step back.” “For us, what was important is to maximize the speed of learning at the time,” he explained. He didn’t say whether Gemini 3.5 Pro has been officially canceled.