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- Gemini 3.5 Flash debuts as Google’s latest model for coding, agentic workflows
Gemini 3.5 Flash debuts as Google’s latest model for coding, agentic workflows
Bay Area Times
May 20, 2026
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Top stories today:
- Gemini 3.5 Flash debuts as Google’s latest coding, agentic model
- Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder, joins Anthropic
- Google’s Gemini app tops 900M MAUs, gets Neural Expressive
- Gemini for Science announced to help researchers test hypotheses
- Meta begins layoffs impacting 8K employees
0. Data and calendar
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All times are ET.
Listen to our AI-generated podcast summarizing today’s newsletter (beware of hallucinations):
1. Gemini 3.5 Flash debuts as Google’s latest model for coding, agentic workflows
Gemini 3.5 Flash marked a significant jump over Gemini 3 Flash on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index:
Gemini 3.5 Flash costs $1.5/$9 per 1M input/output tokens, versus GPT-5.5’s $5/$30, Opus 4.7’s $5/$25, and Kimi K2.6’s $0.95/$4.
3x Gemini 3 Flash Preview’s $0.5/$3 pricing.
Available to consumers through the Gemini app and Google Search’s AI Mode.
Google Search added longer queries, image/video uploads, and Gemini 3.5 Flash-powered search agents.
Gemini 3.5 Flash-powered Gemini Spark debuted as a “24/7 personal AI agent” with Google Workspace integration.
Gemini 3.5 Pro will launch next month, Sundar Pichai said at Google I/O keynote, prompting groans from attendees expecting an earlier release.
Separately, Google launched Gemini Omni, a multimodal model for video generation and editing
Gemini Omni is initially available to Google AI subscribers, without an API release.
Google’s Flow and Flow Music now support Gemini Omni.
YouTube Shorts Remix and Create apps also received Gemini Omni support.
YouTube also added a conversational search feature.
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3. Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI co-founder, joins Anthropic to advance Claude pretraining
Karpathy will help launch a new team focused on using Claude itself to accelerate pretraining.
The hire marks a major win for Anthropic in the intensifying AI talent race.
2022: Karpathy left Tesla as director of AI and has since become one of the field’s most influential public educators.
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5. Google’s Gemini app tops 900M MAUs, gets Neural Expressive redesign
