Google Wants to Launch the Most Powerful Model on the Market. It Just Hasn't Managed To Yet.
Unveiled at Google I/O in May, Gemini 3.5 Pro promised to arrive in June with the largest context window ever, 2 million tokens, and an advanced reasoning mode called Deep Think. It's June, and the model still hasn't shipped to the public.
At Google I/O 2026, CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage to announce Gemini 3.5 Pro with an ambitious promise: Google's most advanced model would arrive in June, with a context window of 2 million tokens, the largest ever used in a production model, and a reasoning mode called Deep Think.
The audience reacted with applause. And with skepticism too: Pichai's exact words were "give us one more month to get it to you," which drew a visible wave of groans in the conference video.
It's now June. Gemini 3.5 Pro is still in limited preview for enterprise customers of Google's Vertex AI. It hasn't reached the Gemini app, hasn't reached Google AI Studio, and hasn't reached the consumer Gemini Pro or Ultra plans. Prediction markets are pricing the odds of a launch by June 30 at just 50-55%.
What's at stake is huge. A 2-million-token window means the model can process entire books, massive codebases or long conversation histories in a single pass, something unmatched in today's market. On top of that comes Deep Think, a step-by-step reasoning mode similar to what OpenAI implemented in its o1 and o3 models.
The projected price is steep: around $15 per million input tokens and $60 per million output tokens, ten times the cost of Gemini 3.5 Flash.
The race for frontier AI has never been more intense. And this time, Google may be arriving late to its own party.
In plain words
- Token: a unit of text processed by an AI model, roughly 3/4 of an English word
- Context window: the maximum amount of text a model can process at once
- Deep Think: Gemini 3.5 Pro's advanced step-by-step reasoning mode
- Vertex AI: Google's enterprise artificial intelligence platform
- Frontier model: an AI model at the outer edge of current technological capability
- Google I/O: Google's annual developer conference