GoKawiilJoe Maring / Android Authority
TL;DR Google is reportedly very close to launching Gemini 3.8 Flash.
The upcoming model could arrive with major vibe coding upgrades to take on Anthropic’s Fable and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol.
Google has internally scrapped plans to launch Gemini 3.5 Pro, and could only release the next Pro model with Gemini 4.0.
With such a wide range of applications, Gemini feels more like a general-purpose technology or GPT (no, not that GPT) and less like a specialized frontier model. But it has made reasonable strides in vibe coding. Earlier in March, Google CEO Sundar Pichai himself said that 75% of Google’s code is vibe coded and approved by engineers. While that could be why Pixel’s software updates remain a mess, Google is continuing to advance its vibe coding focus and is reportedly testing a new model that could compete with stalwarts such as Claude Cowork (powered by Fable or Mythos), (now) xAI-owned Cursor, and ChatGPT’s Codex.
DeepMind, Google’s frontier AI research arm, could soon release a new model with significantly improved coding capabilities, the Wall Street Journal has reported (paywalled). Based on internal testing, Google’s engineers reportedly found the new model, Gemini 3.8 Flash, better than Anthropic’s Opus (unspecified version).
The WSJ report further claims that Google could release Gemini 3.8 Flash as soon as later today, i.e., on September 2. This comes just weeks after Google released Gemini 3.7 Flash with coding capabilities better than Claude’s Sonnet 5 (not the more weighted Opus).
This would be DeepMind’s second major release since its latest rejig, where co-founder, CEO, and Nobel laureate Demis Hassabis was moved to a broader role overseeing AI development across parent company Alphabet.
The need to stress vibe coding could also arise from the recent release of z.AI’s GLM-5.3-Flash, which recently took the internet by storm after being previewed as a stealth model (under codename Ox Alpha) on OpenRouter.
According to BencLM’s vibe coding leaderboard, Anthropic’s Claude Fable and OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 Sol are among the top 10 best-performing frontier models for coding. Gemini 3.7 Flash, on the other hand, ranks 17th.
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