Google parent Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) CEO Sundar Pichai made one of his boldest comments yet about the company’s AI ambitions during Wednesday’s earnings call, saying the company has already begun its “most ambitious pretraining run yet” for Gemini 4.
“We have started our most ambitious pretraining run yet for Gemini 4,” Pichai said. “I am very excited by the progress I’m seeing internally. I’m confident that people will be pleased.”
The remark stood out because Google has neither unveiled Gemini 4 nor announced a launch timeline. Yet Pichai said the company is building the model to compete at “the frontier level of where the frontier will be when Gemini 4 comes out.”
That suggests Google isn’t trying to match today’s leading AI models. Instead, the company is targeting the capabilities it expects competitors to have by the time Gemini 4 is released.
AI Race Intensifies
The comments come as the AI race intensifies between Google, Sam Altman‘s OpenAI, Anthropic and Elon Musk‘s SpaceXAI (NASDAQ:SPCX), with companies racing to build more capable reasoning models and AI agents.
Pichai also acknowledged that Google still has room to improve in agentic coding, an area where rivals have gained momentum. However, he said the recently released Gemini Flash 3.6 model improved by more than 10 percentage points on coding benchmarks within six weeks and that Google now plans to ship updated models every month.
Alphabet Q2 Earnings
The AI update accompanied another strong quarter for Alphabet. The company posted its 12th straight quarter of double-digit revenue growth, while Google Cloud revenue climbed 32% year over year. The company also reported a record backlog of more than $106 billion in remaining performance obligations.
For investors, Pichai’s strongest message wasn’t about Google’s latest AI model—it was about the one the public hasn’t seen yet. By saying Gemini 4 is being trained for where the AI frontier will be, not where it is today, the Alphabet CEO signaled Google believes its next flagship model will compete with the industry’s most advanced systems whenever it launches.
Price Action: Alphabet’s Class A shares closed 1.46% lower at $342.09 on Wednesday before falling another 3.31% in after-hours trading. Class C shares ended the session down 1.24% at $341.91 and slipped an additional 2.92% after the bell.
Benzinga edge rankings indicate that GOOGL has a Momentum score in the 87th percentile and a Growth score in the 90th percentile.
Photo courtesy: Jack Gruber-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn
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