Google never released a Gemini 3.5 Pro, and CEO Sundar Pichai has now explained why. Journalist Alex Heath, on X, posted the exchange on 22 October 2026, and it shows a tradeoff that every large lab faces when it has two models in training at once.
Pichai said the team “internalized” that its models had “gaps in agentic capabilities, particularly around coding.” Flash, the smaller and cheaper tier, allowed far more training iterations in the same time, so the fixes went there first. That work produced a string of Flash releases running from 3.5 through 3.8.
Pichai said the team then had a chance to apply the gains to Pro, but “Argon pre-training was done.” In plain terms, the large model’s foundation was already locked.
Heath’s post does not say whether a Pro model built on those lessons is planned, or when. Developers who were waiting for a bigger Gemini this year should build against Flash, because that is where Google’s coding progress landed.
Reported by Alex Heath, on X, on 22 October 2026.
