Pichai explains why Gemini 3.5 Pro was skipped in favor of Flash iterations

·2026.10.23 09:00

Key point

Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that the team focused on Flash models to rapidly iterate on agentic coding capabilities, leaving no time to apply those improvements to Pro before Argon pre-training concluded.

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Details

Pichai explained that Gemini 3.5 Pro was not shipped because the team prioritized closing gaps in agentic capabilities, particularly in coding, during the middle of the year.
The team chose to use the smaller, more efficient Flash model to enable more iterative loops, leading to the release of versions 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8 Flash.
By the time the Flash improvements were complete, the team had the opportunity to apply them to the Pro model, but Argon pre-training was already finished.
This decision reflects the trade-offs large labs face between rapid iteration on smaller models and the longer development cycles of larger Pro models.

google gemini agentic-ai coding ai-models sundar-pichai

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