Google is rolling out some new AI models — but not the one that many were expecting.
The company announced on Tuesday three Gemini models that it said are faster and cheaper to run AI agents, as Google continues to double down on efficiency over raw power.
That’s not entirely by choice: Google said that Gemini 3.5 Pro, the new frontier model it originally promised for June, is still in testing. Google also teased Gemini 4, the next big flagship model, although that is not expected for several months.
Of the new models rolling out this week, Google describes 3.6 Flash as the “workhorse” that is better than 3.5 Flash at tasks such as coding. Google said 3.6 Flash reduces token usage — units of text processed by AI — by up to 17% compared to its predecessor, according to analysis from Artificial Analysis Index, a benchmark for comparing AI tools.
Google also unveiled 3.5 Flash-Lite, which it says is its fastest and “most cost-effective” version of its 3.5 model yet.
Then there’s 3.5 Flash Cyber, which is designed to find and fix cybersecurity vulnerabilities at a performance level similar to rivals but at a “lower price per token than larger models,” Tulsee Doshi, senior director of product management in Google’s Gemini group, said in a blog post.
That last part is crucial. Anthropic and OpenAI have both rolled out cybersecurity models in recent months, but it seems that, again, Google is hoping to undercut the competition on cost.
With the realization that using lots of tokens doesn’t always merit the best results, more companies are reining in their AI spending and turning to more cost-conscious models. That gives Google a strategic opening.
“Companies are already blowing through their annual token budgets, and it’s only May,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said earlier this year. “If companies used a mix of Flash and other frontier models, they could save a lot of money.”
Google says its new models hit the “sweet spot” of efficiency and power for running agents.
No sign of 3.5 Pro
Gemini 3.5 Pro, Google’s next big frontier model, is being tested with partners and will ship it “as soon as it’s ready,” the company said.
Business Insider reported in June that Google had pushed the targeted release date for 3.5 Pro to July. Bloomberg recently reported the model may have been further delayed.
As of Tuesday, Google hasn’t got a single model among the top 10 ranking in the Artificial Analysis leaderboard, which uses a composite benchmark to score models across areas including maths and reasoning.
Google also said on Tuesday that it has begun its “most ambitious pre-training run yet” for Gemini 4, its next major model.
Typically, Google launches these big flagship models at the very end of the year, and it’s not yet clear whether the 3.5 Pro will be powerful enough to vault Google back to the bleeding edge in the interim.
However, as companies take a more considered approach to their AI spend and cap their token usage, Google is positioning itself for the moment.
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