In the past week, Google has teased quite a bit about Gemini 4, as 3.5 Pro missed its June launch.
Gemini 4
The first mention of the unsurprisingly named “Gemini 4” coincided with the announcement of Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber. As Google tests Gemini 3.5 Pro with partners ahead of a launch “as soon as it’s ready,” work on the “next generation of models” is underway. Specifically, this is the company’s “most ambitious pre-training run yet.”
At the Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings call, Sundar Pichai reiterated that Google is “excited by the progress we are seeing at the frontier.”
During the Q&A portion with analysts, the CEO was asked about his “confidence level that the Gemini models can remain at the frontier.”
Look, I think the frontier is (an) incredibly dynamic space, and it’s fiercely moving forward. At any given moment when you take a snapshot, it feels dynamic. We have had clearly frontier models. There are many attributes on which we are still at the frontier. There are areas where we have acknowledged we need to improve. Coding and agentic coding is an example of that, and I think the teams are very, very focused on it.
Pichai explicitly said Google is “both very committed and very confident of being at the frontier.” Furthermore: “We want to compete at the frontier level of where the frontier will be when Gemini 4 comes out, and so we are applying a lot of our compute and effort in that direction.”
A separate question asked Pichai how Google is balancing internal and external customer demand for Tensor Processing Units (TPUs):
In terms of allocating TPUs, look, our first priority is making sure we are allocating what we need to compete at the frontier in terms of AGI development. And so that is the foundation for everything we do.
The closest we got to specifics this week was that Gemini 4 will need a “larger base model to compete at that frontier model.”
For the next generation of frontier, you’re going to need much larger base models. We are now training Gemini 4, and we’re being very ambitious with it. I am very excited by the progress I’m seeing internally on Gemini 4, and I’m confident that people will be pleased when we are putting it outside. Based on past releases, Gemini 4 should launch in November or December.
Gemini Flash
Pichai also said to expect continued iteration on the Gemini 3.x Flash models “with further progress in agentic coding, et cetera.” Specifically, Google is targeting “releasing models almost at a monthly cadence.”
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