Pichai Recaps Gemini 4 Argon Launch: Explains Why 3.5 Pro Was Cut and Teases 5.0

Google CEO Pichai revealed in an interview on the podcast "Sources" that Gemini 4 Argon processed about 25 trillion tokens within 72 hours of launch, roughly 3 times the same period for Gemini 3.0, and that access was restricted early on due to compute constraints. He explained that Gemini 3.5 Pro was abandoned because the team found a gap in Agentic Coding and instead spent about 3 months continuously iterating from 3.5 to 3.8 Flash; by the time the Pro approach was proven out, Argon pretraining was already complete, so they injected the accumulated work into Argon post-training. He also mentioned that internally they have entered an RSI phase in which researchers and models collaborate, and said the next-generation Gemini 5.0 will be far stronger than Argon.