Google DeepMind announced three new Gemini models on Tuesday, including Gemini 3.6 Flash, 3.5 Flash-Lite, and 3.5 Flash Cyber. The company emphasized the focus on efficiency, latency, and reliability for customers developing AI agents at scale. Gemini 3.6 Flash is described as the 'workhorse model' with improved capabilities in coding, knowledge work, and multimodal performance, while reducing token usage by up to 17%, making it cheaper than its predecessor, 3.5 Flash. The release highlights Google's efforts to provide optimized models for specific use cases, such as cybersecurity, with 3.5 Flash Cyber being fine-tuned for finding and fixing vulnerabilities at a reasonable cost. This model is exclusively available to governments and trusted partners through a limited access pilot program, according to Google. Google said the focus of the release is to deliver efficiency, latency, and reliability to customers building AI agents at scale. The launch is notable for what it did not include, as the long-anticipated update to Gemini Pro was absent. The update does not include the long-anticipated update to Google’s flagship model, Gemini Pro, which was last updated in February. In the time since that launch, OpenAI has released GPT-5.5 and begun rolling out GPT-5.6, while Anthropic has launched Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Sonnet 5 and has expanded access to its frontier Fable 5 model, highlighting the intense release pace of the rival labs. Google teased the release of Pro as part of the 3.5 Flash release in May, saying the Pro version was 'already being used internally, and we look forward to rolling it out next month.' Last week, Bloomberg reported that Google was facing internal delays in launching the 3.5 Pro as it struggled to meet internal performance goals. Gemini Pro models are generally Google’s highest-capability offerings for complex reasoning and coding tasks, while Flash models prioritize lower cost and faster response times for production applications. Google DeepMind product lead Logan Kilpatrick said Tuesday that the company is currently testing Gemini 3.5 Pro with partners and hopes to 'land soon.' He also noted that the team has started its most ambitious pre-training run yet for Gemini 4.

Source: techcrunch