According to the popular narrative right now, Google is behind when it comes to AI models. In the popular imagination, it finished at the top of the pile last year, and then got steamrolled by “agents” when platforms like OpenClaw made token-guzzling agentic coding into the AI trend of 2026.
So if you’ve been waiting for Google DeepMind to pivot to coding, like OpenAI did in March, that’s now on the verge of happening, according to an anonymously-sourced story in the Wall Street Journal.
The Journal says Gemini 3.8 Flash, also known as “Skimaki” could be released as early as Wednesday (It’s Tuesday as I’m writing this). The anonymous insiders who spoke to the Journal touted the model’s “significantly upgraded coding capabilities.”
To be clear, this supposed release will not be the sort of multi-trillion parameter model like OpenAI’s still-unreleased Astra. Frontier AI models now routinely come with prophecies of doom before they’re released, and have to endure a mysterious vetting procedure from the White House. Instead of being the biggest and strongest, Gemini Flash models, like this rumored 3.8 Flash release, are designed to run faster and cheaper, which are also increasingly valuable attributes—thus the rise of platforms for efficiently aggregating tokens from different models, like OpenRouter.
But the timing here is no accident. DeepMind founder and former boss Demis Hassabis stepped aside as Deepmind’s CEO early last month. While insiders were quick to claim that he’d had one foot out the door for about a year, it was also widely reported that Google founder Sergey Brin was taking a more active interest in AI, and planning on quickly shipping more competitive Gemini models.
Hassabis, remember, is a Nobel prize winner in chemistry and has sounded as recently as last year like he was in no hurry to release revolutionary models given the risks. His new role at DeepMind is largely focused on scientific research, where he seems more comfortable.
The Journal’s Google insiders say “Skimaki” has been tested on an internal coding tool called “Jetski,” and apparently coders say they like it better than Anthropic’s Claude Opus.