The date, and who set it
Gemini 4 has entered early post-training and Google DeepMind wants it out well before the end of the year, its head Koray Kavukcuoglu said at The Information’s AI Agenda Live Summit, as reported on Thursday. He used the phrase “much earlier” than year-end and said the intention is to release an early post-training version as soon as the results justify it.
Post-training is the stage after the expensive pre-training run, where a base model is shaped into something usable. Saying a model is in it is a real signal about schedule, and a soft one about quality.
Kavukcuoglu took over Google DeepMind in August. This is his first public commitment on the company’s flagship line.
Why the timing is the story
Gemini 3 arrived in late 2025. Since then the flagship slot has been empty: Gemini 3.5 Pro was announced for a June 2026 release and never shipped, after missing three deadlines, while the 3.8 series filled the gap with speech, live conversation and lighter models.
Meanwhile OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Astra and the cheaper Sol and Luna models this month, and Anthropic shipped Opus 5.5. A flagship that slips into 2027 leaves Google out of the comparison that buyers are actually making now, which is the pressure the “much earlier” framing is answering.
Kavukcuoglu said the model is in safety testing and that Google engineers are already using it internally for Antigravity, the company’s coding tool. Internal use before release is normal; it is also the quickest way to find out whether a model is good at the one task the market currently pays most for.
The part that is not about the date
He also declined the framing everyone expects from a DeepMind chief. Whether AGI has been achieved, he said, is “not the right conversation”; the goal he named instead was intelligent agents that can be trusted. He said he was “a hundred percent confident” that Google would stay at the frontier.
That is a narrower mission statement than the one DeepMind was founded on, and the shift is worth noting in its own right.
What to watch
The useful test is what “early post-training version” means in practice. If Gemini 4 arrives as a preview to selected partners, that is a schedule claim being met on a technicality — which is roughly what happened to Gemini 3.5 Pro. A public release with pricing and a model card is the thing to wait for.
