Google scraps Gemini 3.5 Pro, to launch Gemini 3.8 Flash tomorrow with coding gains over Opus
新智元 · wechat · 2026-09-02
Per WSJ-sourced reports, Google is cancelling the long-delayed Gemini 3.5 Pro (underwhelming nearly 4 months after its I/O preview) and will instead ship the smaller Gemini 3.8 Flash (codename Skimaki) tomorrow — reportedly crushing Anthropic's Opus in internal coding tests on its Jetski tool. Gemini 4.0 shows strong pretraining evals with post-training underway.
- Google has poured extra headcount and compute into coding since early this year, with heavier RL investment and parallel projects to survive leadership churn (Hassabis stepping aside, Jeff Dean departing).
- OpenAI's next-gen Astra reportedly uses a "recurrent depth" reasoning method to cut thinking tokens while boosting performance, debuting this week; Altman claims human-level computer use. Musk teased Grok 4.7 in 10 days.
Ahead of launch, Google released Agentic Video Understanding: the model itself decides which segments to watch, at what frame rate, and whether to read frames, audio, or transcripts. On standard video benchmarks it cuts token consumption by up to 88% and analysis cost by up to 66% while improving accuracy by up to 7%, at unchanged API pricing. Available on 3.7 Flash, 3.6 Flash, and 3.5 Flash-Lite, enabling sub-second clip retrieval, needle-in-haystack long-video QA, anomaly detection, and counting.
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