Koray Kavukcuoglu, newly elevated to head Google DeepMind, said Gemini 4 has entered early post-training and that he hopes to release it much earlier than the end of 2026, prioritizing shipping over his predecessor’s AGI-focused research emphasis. He said DeepMind pulled back after Gemini 3/3.1 to focus on Flash models and iteration speed, and that whether AGI was achieved is not the right conversation for the lab going forward. The comments come amid a wave of researcher departures from DeepMind to rivals including OpenAI and Anthropic.
