“To put it very bluntly, there's nothing other than being at the frontier that is important for us.” Koray Kavukcuoglu · Google AI: Release Notes
September 2026
Kavukcuoglu was asked directly about the running argument over whether Google DeepMind actually cares about being at the frontier. He opened by conceding the premise — that the quality of their current models sits a little below the frontier — and then answered without hedging. He went on to say every goal and every prioritisation decision the team makes runs through that one criterion.
Transcript
Yes, it's the most ambitious run, correct. And yes, so far, touch wood, it's going well. I am very excited. The team is very excited. I look at these as like step by step, right? So far, everything is looking good. We are excited, but it's all about realizing that potential until we get to a moment that we are actually putting the model in front of users, first internally, then externally. I'm always in a very cautiously optimistic state.
I think maybe to tee you up for a very specific question, there's a sort of meme about whether or not we care about being at the frontier. I see you in meetings all the time and sort of know what your point of view is, but what's your point of view as far as whether or not you think it's important for us as GDM and as a team to try to be at the frontier?
I was surprised. I've seen this comments too. And I can understand, obviously, our quality of current models are a little bit below the frontier. And that's fair enough. To put it very bluntly, there's nothing other than being at the frontier that is important for us. That's it. All our goals, all our focus is always about that. And when we are making decisions, when we are making prioritizations in terms of ideas, in terms of what to do and what goals we should follow. It's all about being at the frontier. And I'm 100% certain that we will be at the frontier. We have an amazing team. I have so much trust in the team. There is like a great amount of creativity and dedication in the team. And being part of Google, we have amazing, amazing resources available to us. We have the whole full stack that we can and we are able to optimize to be able to achieve our goals. If you think about Google as a company, it is a company that has always been at the frontier of investing in the next big technology. It has never shied from investing in a long-term important project, right? AI investment in Google has been not the last five years or 10 years, right? 15 years ago when there was no AI, Google was investing in AI chips. Not chips only, the AI chips. We weren't even talking about AI at the time. So that kind of long-term vision and investment has always been part of Google, like the quantum computing waymo. We talk about these things as if it's normal. But these are very technologically critical and heavily scientific and long-term ambitious endeavors that it's in the DNA of Google. So that's why I feel I have the whole trust for us to be able to achieve that frontier. That's all our goal. That's why we were set up. That's what the whole team feels. There's nothing less than that.
I love that. And I think in this role now that you have leading all of GDM, sort of the frontier AI folks, we actually have a frontier AI team and sort of the products and other stuff are now part of the story. And I'm curious, is there anything from this framing of like the frontier is sort of what we're focused on that you're sort of like excited now that we're sort of bringing these teams together? I know there'll be a lot of business as usual for a lot of folks, but anything particularly that you're excited about?
Gemini, of course, is very much focused on building AGI and delivering the goals. At the end of the day, it relies on two things. One, good execution, right? It's very detailed. It's very complex to build AGI, something that you can put in front of people that they can work with. But also at the same time, it relies on a very large funnel to get ideas from everywhere. So by bringing together GDM, this way, what I'm excited about is, as you said, there's the frontier AI, there's the products, to be able to really orient and steer at least the idea, the knowledge and the focus towards this. You don't want to continuously streamline everything on one because the idea is at the end exploration. Success in building AGI still depends on innovation and exploration and channeling that in the right way through Gemini. I'm excited about being able to do that more. The path to building AGI then really depends on our interaction with the users. And when we say users, yes, some people are using these models in their daily lives to go through their emails, but some scientists are using these models to be better scientists, to do actual research, to invent things that has never been invented and getting help from the models. So the spectrum of usage of these models basically covers everything that is happening in the world. So that usage is our guide. That tells us what are the problems that are worth solving, that people want us to solve. And we need to solve those problems. And that leads us towards AGI. That's how we have something general that people like interacting with, that people rely on, that people trust.
Yeah. I think last time we were talking, you had mentioned this, this like co-building AGI with our customers framing, which I think has just continued, like it makes so much sense, it resonates. I think it like makes it clear why, you know, the deployment matters so much, like why this feedback flywheel matters so much.