Google is nearing the release of its newest flagship model, Gemini 4, the head of its DeepMind division said Wednesday, a long-awaited development after the tech giant fell behind rivals Anthropic and OpenAI in the AI model race.

Speaking at The Information’s AI Agenda Live Summit, in his first media appearance as the new top leader of Google DeepMind, Koray Kavukcuoglu said Gemini 4 is in the early days of a phase of development called post-training, in which a base AI model is refined to behave reliably. He said he hopes the model will be released “much earlier” than the end of the year.