Pichai Explains Why Gemini 3.5 Pro Never Shipped: Google Pivoted to Flash to Fix Agentic Coding Gaps
m4rkmc · x · 2026-10-23
Alex Heath of The Information asked Google CEO Pichai what happened to the never-shipped Gemini 3.5 Pro. Pichai revealed the mid-training pivot:
- While training the 3.5 series, Google was working on both Flash and Pro. Mid-year the team internalized there were gaps in agentic capabilities, particularly around coding.
- The fastest way to hill-climb was Flash — a smaller, more efficient model allowing many more iterative loops — leading to the rapid 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8 Flash releases.
- By the time that was done (quote truncated, the Pro roadmap had evidently been reworked).
A rare public admission from a frontier lab CEO of killing a flagship version to iterate small models against agentic/coding weaknesses — signaling those capabilities now anchor the roadmap.
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