Pichai defends Google AI strategy after Gemini 3.5 Pro delay, Reuters reports

Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai used Wednesday's earnings call to defend Google's AI strategy after delays to a flagship model and concerns the company has lost ground in AI coding, Reuters reported. Investors have grown uneasy over the delayed release of Gemini 3.5 Pro, originally slated for June and expected to bolster Google's position in AI coding and autonomous agent tasks. On the call, Pichai said Google has had frontier models and remains at the frontier on many attributes, while acknowledging the company needs to improve in coding and agentic coding, according to the Reuters report. Rather than dwell on the Gemini 3.5 Pro delay, Pichai highlighted Gemini Flash, describing it as a cheaper, faster workhorse model used in cybersecurity, customer-service agents, data analytics, and enterprise software. He said Gemini 3.6 Flash, released this week, improved by more than 10 points on a coding benchmark versus the prior version while using fewer tokens. Google on Tuesday also unveiled Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite and a cybersecurity-focused Flash Cyber model, while keeping Gemini 3.5 Pro in partner testing. Pichai said people will be pleased when Google unveils Gemini 4, calling it a very ambitious effort, and said the company is training a significantly larger model and remains committed to staying at the leading edge of AI. When asked about release pace, he said the Gemini 4 roadmap includes rolling out models almost at a monthly cadence, Reuters reported. Google's cloud revenue grew 82% in the quarter, above an average estimate of 64%. Alphabet raised its capital expenditure plans by $15 billion to a range of $195 billion to $205 billion. Shares fell more than 3% in after-hours trading, and the stock was down about 9% since the end of April amid Gemini delays and executive departures, according to Reuters.