Pichai defends Google AI strategy as Gemini delay fuels investor concerns about AI race position
14 Sources
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Pichai pushes back on claims Google is losing ground in AI race
July 22 (Reuters) - Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab CEO Sundar Pichai used Wednesday's earnings call to mount a robust defence of Google's AI strategy, pushing back on concerns that the company has fallen behind rivals after delaying a flagship model and ceding ground in AI coding. Investors
[2]
Alphabet shares fall on report its most powerful AI model Gemini 3.5 Pro is delayed
Google's next flagship Gemini model is reportedly months behind schedule Alphabet shares sank 4% on Thursday following a report that the company has delayed releasing its flagship artificial intelligence model. The search giant's Gemini 3.5 Pro AI model is months behind schedule due to the
[3]
Google is not losing the AI race, Pichai tells doubters as cloud jumps 82%
The Alphabet chief conceded Google has ground to make up on coding, even as Q2 revenue hit $119.8bn and 2026 capex climbed again. Sundar Pichai spent Alphabet's Wednesday earnings call doing something he is not used to doing: arguing that Google is not, in fact, falling behind in artificial
[4]
Alphabet's Gemini delay, spending worries loom over earnings
July 21 (Reuters) - Alphabet faces heightened scrutiny from investors as a delay in the launch of a model key to its AI ambitions adds to worries over the payoff from massive data-center spending, months after raising expectations with a blockbuster quarter for cloud sales. The Google parent
[5]
Google's Gemini delay exposes a deeper problem: employee frustration
Why it matters: As the company's cash flow just turned negative, investors and competitors are questioning Google's standing in the AI race. State of play: Google's Gemini 3.5 Pro, its most powerful model in the works, is months behind, per Bloomberg, but the company did just release a series of
[6]
Google Gemini launch delayed as tech falls short of internal goals, Bloomberg News reports
July 16 (Reuters) - Alphabet's (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Google is months behind schedule on the release of Gemini 3.5 Pro, its most powerful flagship AI model, as the tech giant works to improve its capabilities, particularly in coding, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday. The delay comes amid
[7]
Sundar Pichai admits Google trails in AI coding
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai stated during the company's Q2 2026 earnings call that Google needs to enhance its coding and agentic coding capabilities. He emphasized that a larger Gemini 4 base model is essential for maintaining competitiveness in the evolving AI landscape. These comments followed
[8]
Sundar Pichai pushes back on claims Google is losing ground in AI race
The latest setback has fueled worries that Google was losing momentum just as OpenAI and Anthropic and a host of Chinese rivals have accelerated the pace of model releases. On the call on Wednesday, Pichai struck an unusually defensive tone as analysts pressed him on the state of Google's
[9]
Sundar Pichai Just Said Something About Google's Gemini 4 -- and Sam Altman, Elon Musk Should Care - Alphabe
"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
[10]
Alphabet's Gemini delay, spending worries loom over earnings
The Google parent - set to report second-quarter results on Wednesday - has delayed from June the launch of its next flagship model, Gemini 3.5 Pro, built especially to catch up with rivals in the lucrative market for AI coding tools and agentic AI tasks. Alphabet faces heightened scrutiny from
[11]
Alphabet Stock Sinks on Reports of Google Gemini Delays - Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL)
* GOOGL stock is down. See the chart and price action here. Gemini's Coding Weakness Puts Google Behind Rivals Bloomberg reported that the release of Gemini 3.5 Pro has slipped by several months as engineers work to improve the model's capabilities, particularly in coding -- an area where rivals
[12]
Alphabet stock falls on report of Gemini AI model delays By Investing.com
Investing.com -- Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOGL) shares fell 2.3% Thursday afternoon following a Bloomberg report that the company's Google is months behind schedule on delivering Gemini 3.5 Pro, its most powerful flagship AI model. The delay stems from Google taking additional time to improve the
[13]
Alphabet slips after reports of a delay for Gemini 3.5 Pro
According to Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter, Google has postponed the launch of Gemini 3.5 Pro by several months to improve performance ahead of a broad rollout. The model's coding capabilities are said to be below internal expectations, at a time when code generation has become
[14]
Google says Gemini 4 will help it catch up with OpenAI, Anthropic despite AI coding gap
Gemini now has 950 million monthly active users, while Google Cloud revenue surged 82 per cent year-on-year, driven by AI demand. Amid the rising competition in the AI space, Google thinks that the upcoming Gemini 4 model will help it climb the ladder. As per the reports, the company admits that
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Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai mounted a vigorous defense of Google's AI strategy during the company's earnings call, pushing back on concerns that the tech giant is losing ground in AI race. The Gemini 3.5 Pro delay, originally slated for June, has raised questions about Google's competitiveness in AI coding capabilities. Despite 82% cloud growth and strong revenue, investor concerns about AI persist as Alphabet raises its 2026 capex guidance to $205 billion.
Sundar Pichai Defends Google AI Amid Growing Investor Concerns
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai found himself in an unfamiliar position during Wednesday's earnings call: defending Google AI against claims the company is losing ground in AI race. Analysts pressed Pichai on the Gemini delay and whether the company could maintain its position at the frontier of AI development, prompting an unusually defensive tone from the typically confident executive
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Source: ET
"We've had clearly frontier models. There are many attributes on which we are still at the frontier; there are areas where we've acknowledged we need to improve and coding and agentic coding is an example of that," Pichai told JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth
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. The admission was unusually candid for a company that likes to remind everyone it invented the transformer3
.Gemini 3.5 Pro Delay Raises Questions About AI Competitiveness
The AI model delay has become a focal point for investor concerns about AI. Gemini 3.5 Pro, originally announced at Google's I/O developer conference in May and expected to launch in June, is now months behind schedule
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. The model's AI coding capabilities fell short of internal expectations, according to Bloomberg sources, arriving at a particularly challenging moment as rivals like OpenAI and Meta have debuted new models that outpace Google's current offerings in generating software code2
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Source: ET
Alphabet shares fell 4% following initial reports of the Gemini 3.5 Pro delay
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, and dropped more than 3% in after-hours trading following the earnings call1
. The stock performance reflects mounting investor concerns about AI and whether the company can regain leadership in AI coding and frontier reasoning, especially as capital expenditure skyrockets1
.Alphabet AI Strategy Pivots to Flash Models and Gemini 4 Promise
Rather than dwell on the setback, Pichai's Alphabet AI strategy emphasized Gemini Flash, Google's cheaper, faster "workhorse" model powering applications from cybersecurity to customer-service agents. He highlighted Gemini 3.6 Flash, released this week, which improved by more than 10 points on a coding benchmark while using fewer tokens
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. The company also unveiled Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite and a cybersecurity-focused Flash Cyber model1
.Looking ahead, Pichai teased Gemini 4 as a "very ambitious effort," telling analysts "I think people will be pleased" when it launches
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. He disclosed that Gemini 4's roadmap includes rolling out frontier models "almost at a monthly cadence," signaling a more aggressive release schedule to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic1
.Related Stories
Google Cloud Revenue Surges as AI Investments Climb
Despite concerns about losing ground in AI race, Alphabet posted strong financial results. Google Cloud grew 82% to $24.8 billion, far exceeding the roughly 64% analysts had expected
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. Overall revenue reached $119.8 billion for the quarter, up 24% year-over-year . Cloud backlog reached $514 billion, while Gemini models now process 22 billion API tokens per minute3
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Source: Benzinga
However, data-center spending continues to escalate. Alphabet raised its 2026 capital expenditure guidance by approximately $15 billion to between $195 billion and $205 billion
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, with management signaling AI investments would climb again in 20273
. These massive AI investments have pushed the company's free cash flow into negative territory5
.Employee Frustration and Talent Exodus Compound Challenges
Beyond the technical setbacks, employee frustration has emerged as a deeper concern for Google's AI competitiveness. The company has lost high-profile talent including Gemini co-lead Noam Shazeer to OpenAI and Nobel laureate John Jumper to Anthropic
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. "We're behind," one employee told Axios, referring to the company's model capabilities compared with competitors5
.Some sources tied declining morale to Google's April Pentagon deal, which allows the military to use its technology and has prompted multiple public resignations
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. Others attributed burnout to feeling "one step behind competitors"5
. Google disputes these characterizations, stating its attrition rates for AI talent in the first half of this year are lower than the same period last year5
. Gemini's models notably do not crack the top 10 most used in the LLM leaderboard tracked by OpenRouter5
, underscoring the competitive pressure facing the tech giant as it works to convince investors its ecosystem approach will prevail over short-term setbacks.🟡.*References
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