Gemini 4 is in post-training and may ship before year-end
Google DeepMind head Koray Kavukcuoglu said Gemini 4's base training is done and the model could ship well before the end of the year.
What he said
Koray Kavukcuoglu spoke at The Information's AI Agenda Live event on September 24. Gemini 4 has finished base training and is early in post-training, where the model's behaviour is refined. He said results so far are promising and that Google hopes to release it much earlier than the end of the year. He gave no firm date.
Why it matters
Google released Gemini 3 in November 2025. Promised major model updates slipped after that, and the company leaned towards faster, cheaper Flash models in recent months. Meanwhile OpenAI shipped its GPT-6 family and Anthropic released Claude Opus 5.5. Gemini 4 is seen as Google's bid to get back into the race at the top end.
What comes next
Post-training usually covers safety testing, instruction tuning and evaluations, so its length is hard to predict. Kavukcuoglu said the team will keep iterating quickly through this phase.