Google Confirms Gemini 4 Pretraining as Gemini 3.5 Pro Stays Stuck in Partner Testing
Google disclosed it has begun what it calls its most ambitious pretraining run yet for Gemini 4, even as Gemini 3.5 Pro remains unreleased months after its I/O announcement. CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts a larger base model is needed to compete at the frontier.
Google confirmed on July 21 that it has started pretraining Gemini 4, calling it its "most ambitious pre-training run yet," in a post that was ostensibly about the launch of Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite. Two days later, on Alphabet's Q2 earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai told analysts a "larger Gemini 4 base model would be necessary to stay competitive at the next frontier."
- Gemini 3.5 Pro, promised at Google I/O in May, is still stuck in partner testing with no public release date
- Gemini 4 pretraining confirmed July 21, one day before the earnings call
- Pichai flagged coding and agentic coding as the areas most needing improvement
- Interim releases Gemini 3.6 Flash and 3.5 Flash-Lite are the only new Gemini models with public pricing so far
A larger Gemini 4 base model would be necessary to stay competitive at the next frontier. - Sundar Pichai, Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings call
The disclosure effectively concedes that Gemini 3.5 Pro, delayed three times amid reported failures in recursive tool-calling and coding tasks, will be leapfrogged rather than fixed. No specs, benchmarks, or context-window figures for Gemini 4 have been released, and Google has not committed to a 2026 launch window. Compare current Gemini releases against rivals in the arena.