M.G. Siegler • #gemini • Jul 19, 2026

Google (Again) Clearly Needs to Unite Their AI Clans

Um, where is Gemini 3.5 Pro?

As bad as things may be product-wise (not to mention potentially legally?) at OpenAI at the moment with the stumbling out of the gate of the ChatGPT super crap “Super App”, it could be worse. It could be Google. A company which not only lacks a “Super App” but lacks a true frontier model at the moment.

It wasn't a great look when Google I/O came and went in May without Gemini 3.5 Pro. But far worse was that Sundar Pichai said on stage that the flagship model would be coming next month (which Google echoed in a blog post). That would have been June. It's now the end of July. Google says the model is still in testing but it's now not just "not a great look", it's a bad look. This is a $4.2T company seemingly unable to compete with several far smaller players. But worse is that this is after the company already moved heaven and earth once to get out of their own way to effectively compete in AI. And it worked. They had caught up or perhaps even surpassed everyone else.

The timely analogy would be to England going up 1-0 on Argentina and then... shifting to a defensive strategy and getting run over as Argentina stormed on to the World Cup final.

But whereas a few years ago, the problem seemed to be just as much about timidity – that is, Google had much of the technology ready to roll internally (as you might hope given their central role in inventing the ideas behind LLMs), they were just afraid to release it – now it seems firmly rooted in bureaucracy:

The delay has been a source of frustration for Google engineers, AI researchers and managers, many of whom are concerned the company risks losing an edge in the market as rivals Anthropic and OpenAI produce models that exceed Gemini’s capabilities, according to 10 current and former employees. Google has multiple layers of stakeholders involved in preparing models for release, working to weave AI across a vast product portfolio, including search, maps and YouTube, which can cause delays, said the people, who declined to be named discussing internal concerns.

Of course, that's also nothing new at Google. That's largely what was blamed for the 'Bard' fiasco. You know, Google's first attempt to catch up with ChatGPT. That stumble was seemingly only corrected when DeepMind and Google Brain were united under one leader, Demis Hassabis, with a single, unified vision for AI.

But it seems like, as was the case for OpenAI, coding sort of blindsided them. Pichai said as much after I/O that Google was behind in this regard, which must have been a particularly embarrassing thing to admit for the company. But whereas OpenAI was seemingly able to course-correct quickly with Codex, Google has seemingly not been able to. Perhaps it's as simple as one of those big company versus small company dynamics, where being more nimble actually matters more than pure resources.

Then again, resources also seem to matter here quite a bit:

Google’s popular products are a gateway to generative AI for everyday people, and can yield data that makes their answers smarter. But encouraging leadership of every department to move in the same direction is like trying to boil an ocean, one ex-employee said. When mandates shift or efforts end up duplicated in multiple departments, it gets even more difficult to maintain a cohesive strategy, current and former employees said. It’s also a challenge for any one offering to get the resources it would need to succeed, and to gain traction in the market, they said.

I mean, Google probably should hope it's that simple and not as bad as the Llama situation for Meta, as there are definitely shades here of the "Behemoth" model of Llama 4 which was perpetually promised but never came. And soon, Llama itself was put out to pasture. There are no real signals of that here, but well, there are signs that other things are amiss internally at Google at the moment.

After the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked concerns that Google’s search engine would become obsolete, the company declared a “code red” — a useful tactic for cutting through the layers of bureaucracy and internal competition that often slow Google’s product efforts. But now, racing in AI is the normal state of the company, one employee said.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin and others were advocating for Google to move faster to seize opportunities in AI coding, but their efforts were slowed by competing factions within the company, two former employees said. Cloud computing unit Google Cloud, research lab Google DeepMind and the team behind the Android operating system are all building AI coding tools for developers, with involvement from some consumer product teams, too, people familiar with the work said.

Yeah, this is Highlander, not chat apps, Google. There can be only one. Or, if you prefer another movie analogy, it's clearly time to unite the clans. Again.

Google's earnings report is certainly set up to be interesting this week.

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Previously, on Spyglass...