Google just dropped the next wave at I/O. It’s called Gemini 3.5, but you aren’t getting the big brother model just yet.
You are getting Gemini 3.5 Flash. And yes, it’s free. For everyone. Billions of people. Starting now.
Sundar Pichai didn’t hide this one. He announced the immediate launch during the keynote, though the heavy hitter—Gemini 3.5 Pro—is still cooking. Expect that next month in June. Pichai says the team is currently running it internally. He claimed it’s showing “great improvements,” but they are still tweaking things before handing it to the masses.
“We are excited for 3.5… Pro,” Pichai told the press before the keynote. “We are using it internally.”
Why this one matters
Flash isn’t just a name. It’s a signal of speed.
Google swapped the old default. As of Tuesday, 3.5 Flash became the engine driving the Gemini app and the AI Mode search interface globally. They claim it handles coding better. It supports AI agents more robustly. And it chews through tokens with significantly more efficiency than its predecessors.
The metrics back up the hype, if you trust them. Google states Flash crushes Gemini 3.1 Pro on most benchmarks. But the headline number is raw speed. Four times faster than comparable frontier models in terms of output tokens per second. That is TPS. The measure of how fast it actually talks to you.
Koray Kavukcuoglu—Google’s chief AI architect and DeepMind CTO—didn’t hold back either. He described the model as particularly adept at handling multiple agents simultaneously. Long-running tasks. Massive coding overhauls.
He said it can independently manage complex pipelines or steer iterative research projects without human babysitting. There is a wild claim buried in that briefing too. The engineers supposedly tasked their agents with building a working operating system from scratch. They say it succeeded.
That kind of capability scares the competition, or maybe just excites VCs. Either way, Google has a leg up.
Ninety million users.
Actually, that’s lowballing it.
The Gemini chatbot now boasts 900 million monthly active users. Think about that for a second. Last year it was 400 million. That growth rate is insane. Combine that with the omnipresence of Google Search, and the advantage in the AI race widens.
Of course, speed and users don’t come cheap. The hardware bills are staggering. Pichai admitted capital expenditures will hit between $180 billion and $190 billion this year. Compare that to the $31 billion spend back in 2022—right before ChatGPO sparked this whole frenzy—and you see the scale of the bet.
Is it too late for Apple to catch up? Maybe. Or maybe this is just the opening round.
Where to play
You do not need to wait. No early access lists. No beta badges.
Gemini 3.5 Flight is live.
Here is where you will find it:
- Gemini app : On your iOS, Android, or desktop.
- Google AI Mode : The new search experience.
- Google Antigravity : Yes, that’s a product name.
- Google AI Studio & Android Studio : For developers accessing the Gemini API.
- Enterprise platforms : Both the standard and Agent variants are open to businesses.
So there you have it. Free, faster, and everywhere at once.
Does it actually fix the hallucinations? Probably not entirely. But it certainly moves the goalpost.
