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What happened to the missing Gemini 3.5 Pro model that never shipped?

What happened to the missing Gemini 3.5 Pro model that never shipped?

AI research Threadreaderapp.com
Google skipped the release of Gemini 3.5 Pro to prioritize iterative development cycles with the smaller Flash model.
What: Google CEO Sundar Pichai explained that while developing the Gemini 3.5 series, the team found that Flash's smaller size enabled faster improvement loops for agentic coding tasks, and by the time they reached sufficient performance, the Argon pre-training phase for Pro was already finalized.
Why it matters: This reveals how model development workflows at large labs are increasingly driven by iteration speed rather than traditional model-size hierarchies.
Decoder
  • Argon: Likely a codename for a specific pre-training iteration or data-processing pipeline at Google.
Original article

I asked Google CEO Pichai what happened to the missing Gemini 3.5 Pro model that never shipped.

He gave me an interesting window into the hard decisions big labs have to make in model development:

"While training the 3.5 series, we had Flash and Pro, which we were working on. An area we internalized through the middle of this year was that there were gaps in agentic capabilities, particularly around coding...

We wanted to definitely hill climb there, and the team felt the fastest way to do so was using Flash. It's a smaller model and more efficient, so you can really get a lot more iterative loops there. That's what led to 3.5, 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8 Flash.

By the time we got that done, we had a chance to apply it to Pro, but Argon pre-training was done."

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