[cubefox]

I guess they meant to release Gemini 3.5 Pro shortly after 3.5 Flash, but then Mythos/Fable and later GPT-5.6 came out with higher performance than 3.5 Pro, so the managers decided not to release it.

[jdiff]

That reasoning didn't stop them from releasing this batch of models, admittedly that may be less face to lose away from the flagship position.