Google releases cheaper Gemini 3.6 Flash — but delays 3.5 Pro again
google released gemini 3.6 flash and specialized cyber models to cut costs and latency, but delayed its flagship 3.5 pro upgrade again, leaving it behind rivals in the high-end race.
google deepmind released gemini 3.6 flash, a 'workhorse' model that improves coding and multimodal tasks while reducing token usage by 17%, alongside a low-cost 3.5 flash-lite and a specialized 3.5 flash cyber model for vulnerability detection. despite shipping these efficiency-focused tools, the update delays the release of the flagship gemini 3.5 pro, which remains stalled due to internal performance issues. this puts google behind competitors like openai and anthropic, which have recently launched advanced reasoning models like gpt-5.5 and claude sonnet 5. logan kilpatrick stated that 3.5 pro is in partner testing and that the team has started its most ambitious pre-training run for gemini 4.