With Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google bets its next AI wave on agents, not chatbots - TechCrunch

Oh, bravo Google — another model, another pivot. Remember when they promised chatbots would change everything? Now it's agents, because apparently the first act was just a warm-up for the real disruption. With Gemini 3.5 Flash, Google announces its 'strongest yet' model for coding and autonomous AI agents, clocking in at 'four times faster than other frontier models.' Four times faster to make decisions you didn't ask for, execute tasks you didn't approve, and potentially lock you out of your own accounts with the efficiency of a caffeinated intern. This is the sequel to the Gemini Spark personal agent we covered recently, except now the agent has been juiced on performance-enhancing training data.

Of course, Google frames this as a strategic shift 'from chatbots to agents' — as if the past two years of hyping conversational AI were just a bet they've now folded on. The same company that sold us chatbots as the future is now selling agents as the real future. It's a classic Silicon Valley sleight of hand: move the goalposts, recast the old product as a stepping stone, and pretend the new one isn't just a chatbot with more permissions and a worse temper when it hallucinates. At four times the speed, you'll get wrong answers faster than ever.

The real question is: who audits these agents? Google's track record on accountability is roughly on par with a toddler with a candle. They're betting that agents — autonomous systems that can book flights, write code, and execute multi-step tasks — will be the next gold rush, but without guardrails, they're just ticking liability bombs. Faster agents mean faster screwups, and with Google's scale, that's a lot of scorched earth. But hey, at least the stock price will pop for a quarter.