Google DeepMind's new head Koray Kavukcuoglu announced that Gemini 4 is in late-stage training (post-training phase) and will launch before end of 2026. Google has underperformed in large language models this year—Gemini 3.5 Pro missed its July launch window while competitors released Claude 5 and GPT-6 alternatives. Gemini 4's arrival could be critical for Google to regain competitive ground in the LLM race.