DeepMind's Kavukcuoglu Targets Pre-Year-End Gemini 4 Ship

Gemini 4 has entered the early phase of post-training, and Google DeepMind chief Koray Kavukcuoglu says he hopes to ship the flagship model "much earlier" than the end of the year, The Information reported from its AI Agenda Live Summit.

"Our intention is to roll out an early post-training version as soon as possible, because we've already seen promising results and are very excited," Kavukcuoglu said. The remarks were his first public appearance in the top DeepMind role, and they lean on future intent rather than a firm ship date.

The framing was competitive. The article positions Gemini 4 against rival models from OpenAI and Anthropic, which the outlet says have outperformed Google's current lineup. Google's own release cadence has stayed brisk: the day before the summit, the company shipped Gemini 3.8 Flash and Flash-Lite with expanded voice and language coverage.

Markets read the timing signal. GOOGL fell 3.8% in Wednesday's regular session before the remarks landed, and traded up around 0.6% overnight afterward. Post-training itself is a refinement stage that follows the base-model run, and the "early" version Kavukcuoglu described is the one he wants out first.