Google DeepMind: Gemini 4 model is in the fine-tuning phase, release planned earlier than end of year
Google DeepMind head Koray Kavukcuoglu said that the Gemini 4 model is in the fine-tuning phase and the company plans to release it much earlier than by the end of the year. He previously said that leadership in frontier AI is the company's sole priority; the Gemini 3.5 Pro model, despite being announced, was never released.
New: Gemini 3.5 Pro was never released, even though it was announced in May 2026; the project missed 3 deadlines; Demis Hassabis stepped down from leading Google DeepMind in August 2026; Kavukcuoglu replaced him; Kavukcuoglu explicitly rejects AGI as a priority, calling it 'not the right conversation'; Google DeepMind operates under competitive pressure as a 'Gemini factory' (a model-production facility); Gemini 4 is in the 'early phase of post-training', with release planned 'much earlier' than by the end of the year