Koray Kavukcuoglu, DeepMind’s chief technologist, told reporters on Monday ahead of the public launch: “3.5 Flash offers an incredible combination of quality and low latency. It outperforms our latest frontier model, 3.1 Pro, on nearly all the benchmarks,” including coding, agentic tasks, and multimodal reasoning.

He added that it is 4x faster than other frontier models, a speed that’s ideal for coding and agentic tasks, but that Google has “taken it to another level” by developing an optimized version of Flash that’s 12x faster with the same quality.

That speed is central to Flash’s design for agentic work, where multiple AI agents run at the same time on long-running tasks, according to Kavukcuoglu. Onstage at I/O, Google engineer Varun Mohan, demonstrated agents spawning off to work on separate components before coming together to build a full operating system inside Antigravity, the company’s agentic development platform and IDE.

Kavukcuoglu said Flash 3.5 was co-developed with Antigravity so that agents could have a “native environment where they can live, work, and execute.”