Koray Kavukcuoglu on frontier models, coding agents, and building AGI

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.

Yeah,

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's a great amount of creativity and dedication in the team.

And being part of Google, we have 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.