During Wednesday’s earnings call, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai stated the company has begun its “most ambitious pretraining run yet” for Gemini 4, adding, “I am very excited by the progress I’m seeing internally. I’m confident that people will be pleased.” Pichai said Google is building the model to compete at “the frontier level of where the frontier will be when Gemini 4 comes out,” targeting future capabilities rather than today’s leading models. He acknowledged Google still has room to improve in agentic coding but noted the recently released Gemini Flash 3.6 model improved by more than 10 percentage points on coding benchmarks within six weeks, with plans to ship updated models every month. The AI update accompanied Alphabet’s 12th straight quarter of double-digit revenue growth, with Google Cloud revenue climbing 32% year over year and a record backlog of more than $106 billion in remaining performance obligations. Alphabet’s Class A shares closed 1.46% lower at $342.09 on Wednesday before falling another 3.31% in after-hours trading, while Class C shares ended the session down 1.24% at $341.91 and slipped an additional 2.92% after the bell.