Pichai Says Gemini 3.5 Pro Never Shipped as Team Diverted Effort to Flash
Summary
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the Gemini 3.5 Pro model never shipped because the team diverted effort to Flash. He tells Alex Heath that gaps in agentic coding pushed faster iterative loops on the smaller model, producing 3.5 through 3.8 Flash. By then, Argon pre-training had finished.
Key Points
- Pichai says Google internalized gaps in agentic coding "through the middle of this year."
- Pichai says the team "wanted to definitely hill climb" on agentic capability before revisiting Pro.
- Heath says the answer offers a window into the hard decisions large labs make in model development.