With Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google bets its next AI wave on agents, not chatbots

Google launched on Tuesday Gemini 3.5 Flash, a new AI model that the company says is its strongest yet for coding and autonomous AI agents. The model, which was introduced at the company’s annual I/O developer conference, can independently execute coding pipelines, manage research projects, and, in internal tests, build an operating system entirely from scratch. The release signals Google’s shift from pitching AI as a conversational tool to AI as an agentic tool. It’s not just answering questions, but planning, building, and iterating on real work with minimal human input. “3.5 Flash offers an incredible combination of quality and low latency,” Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technologist, told reporters on Monday ahead of the public launch. “It outperforms our latest frontier model, 3.1 Pro, on nearly all the benchmarks,” including coding, agentic tasks, and multimodal reasoning. He added that it is four times faster than other frontier models, a speed that’s ideal for coding and agentic tasks, but that Google has “taken it to another level” by developing an optimized version of Flash that’s 12 times faster with the same quality. That speed is central to Flash’s design for agentic work, where multiple AI agents run at the same time on long-running tasks, according to Kavukcuoglu. …