Google is about to release the next-generation flagship large model, Gemini 4. The head of Google DeepMind revealed this news at an AI industry summit on Wednesday. This is a key product for Google to turn the tide after falling behind Anthropic and OpenAI in the large model race.

Before the release, Google’s model schedule has repeatedly gone off track. The previous generation, Gemini 3.5 Pro, was showcased at the I/O conference in May with a promise to launch "next month," but it missed two deadlines in June and mid-July, and by August it still had not been released, totaling three delays. Internal engineers attributed the delays to a lack of prioritized investment in AI programming capabilities, with Google’s model significantly lagging behind competitors in programming intelligence benchmarks. At one point, Gemini fell out of the top 10 in usage on the commonly used OpenRouter list. Meta's Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang publicly mocked, "Gemini who?" on X.

Following this, there was a major reshuffle in leadership. On August 6, Demis Hassabis stepped down as CEO of DeepMind to become chairman of DeepMind and chief scientist of Alphabet. Former CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu was promoted to senior vice president, responsible for the daily operations of DeepMind, reporting directly to Pichai, and took full control of the Gemini 4 development. The power center shifted from London to the Mountain View headquarters. On August 5, Jeff Dean, who had worked at Google for 27 years and was a co-leader of Gemini's technology, left along with Sanjay Ghemawat, co-leader Oriol Vinyals, and Google Brain co-founder Quoc Le to start a startup called Discovery Loop.

The talent drain has continued for months. In June, Gemini co-leader Noam Shazeer moved to OpenAI; AlphaFold co-inventor and Nobel laureate John Jumper joined Anthropic, followed by AlphaFold veterans Jonas Adler and Alexander Pritzel. Over 580 employees signed an open letter opposing Google’s defense contract with the Pentagon; in May, London employees initiated a union formation, marking the first formal attempt to form a union in a cutting-edge AI lab. Some engineers reported working 60 hours a week for a long time, with the team generally exhausted.

Google's business foundation remains large. In the second quarter, Gemini applications reached 950 million monthly active users, with daily active users doubling year-on-year; the model API processed 22 billion tokens per minute, up from 16 billion in the previous quarter; 9 million developers used the Gemini model for development each month. Google Cloud revenue was $24.8 billion, an 82% year-on-year increase; unfulfilled orders reached $514 billion, with a quarterly increase of $50 billion. The AI model for search surpassed 1 billion monthly active users. Alphabet's total quarterly revenue was $119.8 billion, a 24% year-on-year increase.

In market mechanisms, Gemini 4 bears the pressure of capital expenditure returns. Alphabet raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance from $180 billion to $190 billion to $195 billion to $205 billion, with the second quarter marking the first negative free cash flow quarter in about 20 years. After the earnings report was released, the stock price dropped 3.65% in after-hours trading. Buyers are institutional investors and cloud customers betting on Google AI monetization, while sellers are funds worried about uncontrolled spending. Funds are flowing into TPU chips, servers, and data centers: Google has begun selling TPU computing power directly to external cloud customers and in August obtained warrants to purchase up to 58.97 million shares of Marvell stock. If Gemini 4 can recover the gap in programming capabilities, it will benefit Google Cloud and the custom chip supply chain; those under pressure are Anthropic and OpenAI, which rely on model leadership to maintain API pricing.

Supplementary data: Gemini 3 Pro was released on November 18, 2025, simultaneously launching the Gemini application, Google Search, AI Studio, and Vertex AI. Gemini 3.1 Pro was released in preview on February 19, 2026, scoring 77.1% on ARC-AGI-2, more than double that of Gemini 3 Pro; SWE-Bench Verified scored 80.6%.

Source: Public information