Google DeepMind released Gemini 3.5 Pro on Friday, 17 July 2026, its most capable frontier model to date and the first product of a full architectural rebuild that scrapped the outgoing Gemini 2.5 Pro base model. The release lands as the Shanghai World AI Conference opens and puts DeepMind squarely against OpenAI's GPT-5.6 and Anthropic's Fable 5.
2M-Token Context And A Deep Think Reasoning Mode
Gemini 3.5 Pro ships with a 2-million-token context window, double the largest window on the current frontier field, letting developers pipe entire codebases, book-length briefs or multi-hour transcripts through the model in a single call. A new Deep Think reasoning mode allocates extra inference-time compute to multi-step problem decomposition and is gated behind the $250-per-month Ultra subscription tier, a positioning DeepMind signalled as its response to premium reasoning offerings from rivals.
A Ground-Up Rebuild
The delay from an initial June target was driven by DeepMind engineers finding structural failures in recursive tool-calling and SVG generation on the earlier base model. Rather than patch, the team ran an entirely new pretraining cycle and rewrote the training recipe to lift performance in mathematical reasoning, 3D scene construction and long-horizon coding. Early third-party benchmarks cited by Geeky Gadgets place Gemini 3.5 Pro ahead of Fable 5 in private tests, though the results remain unverified.
Market Positioning Against OpenAI And Anthropic
Alongside Gemini 3.5 Pro, DeepMind is preparing a Gemini 4 Flash speed variant and Nano Banana Pro, an image model built on the new architecture that will compete with OpenAI's GPT-Image 2. The July 17 timing overlaps with Shanghai's WAIC 2026 and follows a spate of enterprise wins for Gemini including the FANUC industrial robot partnership and Apple's Gemini-powered Siri rollout at WWDC 2026. The company has not announced a free tier, continuing its strategy of keeping frontier weights behind paid access.
Reporting based on coverage from iNews Zoombangla, BigGo Finance and Geeky Gadgets.