Google shipped four Gemini Flash models in 106 days. But its flagship frontier model is still nowhere to be seen.

Google debuted its latest AI model, Gemini 3.8 Flash on Wednesday. Google said the model excels at coding and on some benchmarks, its performance equalled that of larger models from rival AI companies, but completed them at a much lower cost.The model’s release comes just three weeks after the release of its predecessor, Gemini 3.7 Flash. And, overall, the company has released no less than four Gemini Flash models since May. Flash is the designation Google uses for the smallest, and fastest versions, of the models it produces. They are generally designed for users seeking speedy responses at a low cost, without sacrificing too much cognitive power.But Google’s flagship Gemini 3.5 Pro model, which CEO Sundar Pichai said would arrive in June, is still missing in action. That has led many AI industry insiders to question whether Google is still able to catch up to the frontier AI of technology.“I really hate to say it, but…gemini who?” Meta chief AI officer Alexander Wang trolled Google on X this week following the release of his own company’s new Muse Spark 1.3 model, which leapfrogged all of Google’s models on a closely-watched performance benchmark. On that benchmark, the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, Google’s best performing model, Gemini 3.8 Flash, now ranks in 10th place.

Google expected Gemini 3.5 Pro to ship in June. It was still undergoing testing in July, and Google’s website still lists it as “coming soon.” Internal candidates were discarded because they did not improve enough over Flash, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Google, however, has begun pointing to the pace at which it has been able to release new Flash models as a sign that it is at the forefront when it comes to a key model building method that the AI industry is cares deeply about: recursive self-improvement, or RSI for short. RSI refers to an AI........

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