Google has revealed a fair bit about Gemini 4 over the past week, even as Gemini 3.5 Pro remains stuck past its original June launch window. Gemini 4 was first referenced alongside the announcement of
Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber, according to a report by 9to5 Google. While Google continues testing Gemini 3.5 Pro with partners ahead of a launch whenever it’s ready, work is already underway on what the company describes as its next generation of models, and specifically, its most ambitious pre-training run to date.
What Sundar Pichai said on the Q2 2026 earnings call
During Alphabet’s Q2 2026 earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai reiterated that Google is encouraged by the progress it’s seeing at the frontier of AI development.
When analysts pressed him during the Q&A on how confident he is that Gemini can stay at the frontier, Pichai gave a fairly detailed answer: “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.”
He followed that up by stating plainly that Google is “both very committed and very confident of being at the frontier,” adding: “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.”
On a separate question about how Google balances internal versus external demand for its Tensor Processing Units, Pichai said: “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 most concrete detail to emerge this week is that Gemini 4 will require a considerably larger base model to stay competitive at the frontier. As Pichai put it: “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.”
Going by Google’s past release patterns, Gemini 4 is expected to launch around November or December.
Pichai also addressed the Flash lineup, saying users should expect continued updates to the Gemini 3.x Flash models, with further progress specifically in agentic coding. According to Pichai, Google is aiming to release models at close to a monthly cadence going forward.
