Google scraps Gemini 3.5 Pro candidates as Gemini 4 remains in development

Google $GOOGL reportedly scrapped internal Gemini 3.5 Pro candidates after they failed to deliver enough improvement over the company's Flash models.
Meanwhile, Gemini 4 has reportedly performed well during pretraining evaluations but remains in posttraining development.
The decision illustrates the increasingly high performance threshold for frontier AI releases as developers balance model capability against inference cost, speed and efficiency.