Is Google losing AI race? Sundar Pichai says no, wait for Gemini 4

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has pushed back against claims of the company falling behind in the AI race. Pichai says that Google will soon bridge the gap with the release of Gemini 4.

In Short

• Sundar Pichai says wait for Google Gemini 4
• He accepts Google behind in coding with its AI models
• Pichai insists Google still at the frontier in other areas

When you think of an AI model, you may likely think of ChatGPT or perhaps Claude comes to your mind. Google’s Gemini, on the other hand, is unlikely to be at the top of the list as the company continues to struggle to catch up to rivals when it comes to agentic AI or coding tasks. However, Google CEO Sundar Pichai says that it is not lagging behind, and assured investors that it will bounce back with Gemini 4.

During the earnings call of Google’s parent company Alphabet, Pichai pushed back against claims that Google is falling behind rivals. The Google chief claimed that “people will be pleased” when it launches Gemini 4, which is expected to be a major improvement compared to older models.

The Google CEO claimed that Gemini 4 was a "very ambitious effort." According to Sundar Pichai, the new Google AI model was significantly larger than its previous models, which would allow it to compete at the frontier. Pichai insisted that Google remained “very committed and very confident” to stay at the front in the AI race.

You see, an AI model trained on larger parameters is usually more powerful. That is, the larger the model, the better it performs. While companies like Google and OpenAI don’t release parameters for their close-weight AI models, Moonshot AI’s latest Kimi K3 open-weight model is trained on over 2.8 trillion parameters – the largest for an open model.

Pichai’s comments come after reports of Gemini 3.5 Pro being delayed surfaced online. As per reports, the AI model was delayed after it failed to meet Google’s internal goals when it came to coding and agentic tasks – areas dominated by Anthropic and OpenAI.

Sundar Pichai accepts Google behind in AI coding

Responding to JPMorgan analyst Doug Anmuth, Pichai claimed that Google still had the edge in certain areas. He said, "There are many attributes on which we are still at the frontier.”

Though the Google chief admitted that the company did lag behind in some key areas. “There are areas where we've acknowledged we need to improve and coding and agentic coding is an example of that,” he added.

To give you some context, coding has quickly emerged as one of the most important skills for AI tools. Companies globally are increasingly using AI tools like Claude Code and Codex to write code. Even Meta and Elon Musk’s SpaceX have joined the AI coding race with new AI models.

Rather than focus on the delay to Gemini 3.5 Pro during the earnings call, Pichai repeatedly highlighted Gemini Flash, Google's lower-cost and faster model used in cybersecurity, customer service agents, data analytics and enterprise software. He said Gemini 3.6 Flash, released earlier this week, had improved by more than 10 points on a coding benchmark compared with the previous version while using fewer tokens.

The company also unveiled Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite and a cybersecurity-focused Flash Cyber model, while keeping Gemini 3.5 Pro in partner testing. His defence reflected a wider effort to persuade investors to look beyond one delayed flagship model and at Google's broader AI ecosystem, including cloud infrastructure, custom chips and Gemini products embedded across its services.

Gemini crosses 950 million users

That is not to say that Google is not seeing returns on its investments. Sundar Pichai said, "Our AI investments are redefining what's possible across every part of our business," adding that the company had "exciting momentum across the board.” As per the company, Gemini had 950 million monthly active users, up from 750 million in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Google Cloud revenue rose 82 per cent year-on-year to $24.8 billion, ahead of analyst expectations, with the company saying enterprise AI solutions and AI infrastructure adoption drove the increase. The company added that its cloud backlog had climbed to $514 billion.

Alphabet reported profit of $112.1 billion, up from $28.1 billion a year earlier, while overall revenue rose 24 per cent to $119.8 billion and Google Services revenue increased 15 per cent to $94.5 billion.

Even so, Wall Street remains focused on rising capital costs and whether Google can regain leadership in AI coding and frontier reasoning. Reports around the earnings release described annual capital expenditure plans in a range from $180 billion-$190 billion to $195 billion-$205 billion, and Alphabet shares fell more than 3 per cent in after-hours trading. The stock is down about 9 per cent since the end of April.

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