Google Gemini 3.8 Flash expected to launch as soon as Wednesday local time, internal codename "Skimaki"

PANews reported on September 2, citing IT Home and The Wall Street Journal, that Google is about to release a new-generation programming model, Gemini 3.8 Flash, internally codenamed “Skimaki,” which may go live as early as Wednesday local time. Internal testing shows that the model has significantly narrowed the gap between Google and Anthropic and OpenAI in programming capabilities. Gemini 3.8 Flash belongs to the smaller, faster, and cheaper Flash series, and its release comes at a time of major personnel changes at Google DeepMind — Koray Kavukcuoglu has been promoted to senior vice president of DeepMind and will take over overall operations. Previously, Google encountered setbacks in model development, with several well-known researchers leaving this summer, the release of a new flagship Pro series model already months behind schedule, and the next-generation flagship Gemini 4 still in the post-training stage. To improve programming capabilities, Google has invested more resources into reinforcement learning and recruited former OpenAI post-training lead Barret Zoph as vice president of research.