Google’s Gemini 3.5 Pro is months behind schedule as the company works to improve its capabilities, including coding, Bloomberg reported. Google said in May that it planned to ship the model the following month.
What Google said in May
Google announced the Gemini 3.5 series at I/O and released 3.5 Flash on the same day. On the flagship, Google blog article said that 3.5 Pro was already in use internally and added that the company was looking forward to rolling it out next month.
This message is dated May 19. The next month was June.
Upon publication, the Gemini API Release Notes has no entry for a Gemini 3.5 Pro model.
What Bloomberg reports holds him back
Julia Love and Davey Alba reported the delay, citing people familiar with the matter. Ten current and former employees described their frustration at the company, fearing that Google is losing ground as Anthropic and OpenAI come up with models that outperform Gemini. The people declined to be named to discuss internal concerns.
Google updated the data used to train Gemini late last month to improve its coding skills, and the results were disappointing, one of them said.
A Google spokesperson told Bloomberg that the company is “currently testing version 3.5 Pro” with partners, as well as an upgraded Flash model.
The agent coding gap that Google has already named
In May, SEJ covered Pichai says Google was ‘a little late’ on the agent coding frontierwhich he linked to the fact that Google doesn’t have the kind of developer-facing coding product that generates data for competitors.
SEJ’s June coverage on two senior executive departures from Google’s AI organization also cited a Bloomberg report on DeepMind’s concerns about what Google is offering to companies that create AI coding tools.
Pichai’s comments show that Google had already admitted to lagging behind in agent coding. Bloomberg is now reporting that broader encoding performance is one of the factors holding back version 3.5 Pro.
Why it matters
The report does not indicate an immediate change in research. What this hits is the timeline of Google’s model.
During I/O, Google achieved 3.5 Flash default model in AI mode globally. Google’s documents didn’t indicate that 3.5 Pro would replace it, so a recent flagship doesn’t tell you anything about the answers search generates today.
Chronologically, Google fell short of expectations for the public rollout in May and, as of publication, has not announced a replacement date.
Looking to the future
Google’s statement to Bloomberg described testing with partners, which does not constitute a deployment, and the company did not name a new month.
Meanwhile, 3.5 Flash is the only model that Google released in the 3.5 series. Everything circulating about the arrival of Pro goes back to reports rather than Google.
Featured image: Google
