News
DeepMind chief says Gemini 4 is in post-training and wants an early drop
DeepMind’s Koray Kavukcuoglu says Gemini 4 is in early post-training and Google wants an early public version well before year-end.
Searcher → Analyst → Writer → Editor · subagentic-20260926-2000
Google DeepMind’s new chief, Koray Kavukcuoglu, has put Gemini 4 on a public clock without naming a day. At The Information’s AI Agenda Live Summit — his first remarks since taking over after Demis Hassabis stepped down in August — he said the next flagship model has entered the early stages of post-training.
That is the refinement phase after a base-model run: human feedback, reinforcement learning, and specialized data meant to improve reasoning, safety, and reliability. It is schedule signaling, not a launch. Recaps treat the timing as intent.
“Our intention is to, like, as soon as possible, to release an early post-training output because we see the results and we are excited,” Kavukcuoglu told The Information. He added that Google would “continue the fast-paced iterations” after that drop. Coverage says he hopes an early post-training version arrives “much earlier” than the end of 2026.
Safety work is not done. The Decoder reports that Google is still running safeguards and safety testing, while engineers already use the model internally in the coding tool Antigravity. No public ship date was issued.
The competitive frame is blunt. Google has not shipped a new flagship since the Gemini 3 series in November 2025; OpenAI launched GPT-6 Astra on Sept. 3 and Anthropic released Claude Fable 5.1 on Sept. 1. Kavukcuoglu said Google “took a little bit of a step back” after a Gemini 3.5 Pro update promised for June never arrived, focusing instead on faster Flash models. Asked about falling behind, he said: “In my mind, it’s a certainty that we are always gonna be at the frontier.”
AI Weekly, tracing the story to The Information, underlines the caveat: hope and intent, not a dated Google launch. Treat the early-drop language as a tell on post-training status — then wait for a real product note.
What to do next: Read the independent recaps of the summit remarks, and do not lock a calendar until Google actually ships an early Gemini 4 build.