Pichai responds to why Gemini 3.5 Pro was not released
Alex Heath asked Google CEO Pichai why Gemini 3.5 Pro ultimately was not released. Pichai said that while training the 3.5 series, the team found gaps in agentic capabilities, especially in coding, and believed that iterating with the smaller, more efficient Flash would be faster, so they released 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8 Flash in succession; by the time this set of capabilities could be applied to Pro, Argon pretraining had already been completed.
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Pichai explained the trade-offs behind not releasing Gemini 3.5 Pro, which lets readers understand the conflict between capability catch-up and the pretraining window in large model R&D.
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View original postSundar Pichai on Gemini 4 and the AI compute crunch Even Google can’t get enough compute. I sit down with Google and Alphabet CEO @sundarpichai shortly after the wider release of Gemini 4 Argon to discuss its early reception, where he still wants the model to improve, and what it takes to keep Google at the frontier of AI. Pichai explains the recent leadership shakeup at Google DeepMind and why building frontier models has become an “all-consuming” job. We also get into Google’s answer to the personal agent race, how he predicts Gemini will do more work on your behalf, and whether agents will finally bring Search, Gmail, and Gemini together. I ask him about Google turning free cash flow negative, the risks in the AI infrastructure buildout, and how he plans for demand years before knowing what the models will be capable of. He explains the signals giving him confidence to keep spending and how he uses AI agents to follow model development and compute usage inside Google. Timestamps: 00:00 Gemini Argon launch reception 01:49 Model access and safety 06:20 The AI model race 08:35 Agentic breakthroughs and 2027 11:34 Recursive self-improvement 15:41 DeepMind leadership changes 19:52 Google's AI compute investments 25:20 Is AI spending sustainable? 33:18 How Sundar uses AI agents 35:35 Gemini's personal agent plans 38:37 How AI agents change the web 43:52 Google's space data centers 47:38 Waymo's expansion strategy 50:26 Wing's drone delivery plans 51:36 AI safety and regulation 55:58 Google's quantum computing bet YouTube: https://t.co/1Cc25LitmB Spotify: https://t.co/XnD4pEEsh8 Substack: https://t.co/0SrnNGKqlm Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/8UKvyXTlFF This episode's presenting sponsor is @hyperagentapp. Thanks to the show’s premiere sponsors: @Atlassian, @meetgranola, and @mercury.
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Sundar Pichai on Gemini 4 and the AI compute crunch Even Google can’t get enough compute. I sit down with Google and Alphabet CEO @sundarpichai shortly after the wider release of Gemini 4 Argon to discuss its early reception, where he still wants the model to improve, and what it takes to keep Google at the frontier of AI. Pichai explains the recent leadership shakeup at Google DeepMind and why building frontier models has become an “all-consuming” job. We also get into Google’s answer to the personal agent race, how he predicts Gemini will do more work on your behalf, and whether agents will finally bring Search, Gmail, and Gemini together. I ask him about Google turning free cash flow negative, the risks in the AI infrastructure buildout, and how he plans for demand years before knowing what the models will be capable of. He explains the signals giving him confidence to keep spending and how he uses AI agents to follow model development and compute usage inside Google. Timestamps: 00:00 Gemini Argon launch reception 01:49 Model access and safety 06:20 The AI model race 08:35 Agentic breakthroughs and 2027 11:34 Recursive self-improvement 15:41 DeepMind leadership changes 19:52 Google's AI compute investments 25:20 Is AI spending sustainable? 33:18 How Sundar uses AI agents 35:35 Gemini's personal agent plans 38:37 How AI agents change the web 43:52 Google's space data centers 47:38 Waymo's expansion strategy 50:26 Wing's drone delivery plans 51:36 AI safety and regulation 55:58 Google's quantum computing bet YouTube: https://t.co/1Cc25LitmB Spotify: https://t.co/XnD4pEEsh8 Substack: https://t.co/0SrnNGKqlm Apple Podcasts: https://t.co/8UKvyXTlFF This episode's presenting sponsor is @hyperagentapp. Thanks to the show’s premiere sponsors: @Atlassian, @meetgranola, and @mercury.
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I asked Google CEO Pichai what happened to the missing Gemini 3.5 Pro model that never shipped.
He gave me an interesting window into the hard decisions big labs have to make in model development:
"While training the 3.5 series, we had Flash and Pro, which we were working on. An area we internalized through the middle of this year was that there were gaps in agentic capabilities, particularly around coding...
We wanted to definitely hill climb there, and the team felt the fastest way to do so was using Flash. It's a smaller model and more efficient, so you can really get a lot more iterative loops there. That's what led to 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8 Flash.
By the time we got that done, we had a chance to apply it to Pro, but Argon pre-training was done."