A Google executive has given the clearest hint yet on when the company’s next flagship model ships.
Koray Kavukcuoglu, who now heads the Google business unit after replacing DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, told The Information’s AI Agenda Live Summit that Gemini 4 is in post-training and should be ready “much earlier” than the end of the year. Post-training is where a raw model is tuned and tested. Some Google watchers read the comment as pointing to October.
Google’s roadmap slipped first. Gemini 3.5 Pro never appeared, despite expectations that it would headline the May 2026 developer conference. Its high-end sibling fared little better. Only one update has reached Gemini 3 Pro, and that landed in November 2025.
The cheaper tiers moved faster. Three Flash models arrived in July alone, aimed at routine work.
Competitors have been louder. OpenAI shipped multiple frontier refreshes after Sam Altman’s internal Code Red memo, and Anthropic has updated its top Claude models several times. Developers building on Gemini have noticed the gap.
No date is public, so the remark reads as a direction of travel rather than a schedule.
