Technology

On August 5, 2026, Google announced that Demis Hassabis would move to Chair of Google DeepMind and Chief Scientist of Alphabet, handing day-to-day operational control of GDM to Koray Kavukcuoglu, who now oversees Gemini model development and Frontier AI research as SVP reporting to Sundar Pichai. Jeff Dean, a 27-year Google veteran, is departing to co-found Discovery Loop, a public-benefit corporation focused on AI for science and engineering, with Google confirmed as a founding investor. The changes arrive alongside separate departures of Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic and Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI, and a continued delay in the Gemini 3.5 Pro release due to the model falling short of internal benchmarks.

As of early August 7, 2026, xAI's official release notes and models page list Grok 4.5 as the newest available model, with no entry for Grok 4.6. The only confirmed details about Grok 4.6 come from Elon Musk's personal posts on X, which describe a 1.5 trillion parameter model with improved supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, followed by a 2.1 trillion parameter Grok 4.7 weeks later. No independent benchmarks, API listings, pricing, or architectural specifics for Grok 4.6 have been published by xAI.