Google's top talent is leaving. Will Google be able to catch up to the AI frontier again?

Noam Shazeer and John Jumper, legendary DeepMind researchers, left this week for OpenAI and Anthropic. Meanwhile Gemini-3.1-Pro is 4 months old, and was months behind the frontier when it came out. For all this news about Google as a frontier AI lab, are they actually one? I think it all comes down to Gemini-3.5-Pro. Sundar Pichai said a month ago it would be out "in a month", but no sign of it yet. If it comes out soon, is extremely good, and isn't extremely expensive or restricted, then Google might have caught up to Anthropic and OpenAI. But that's a lot of "ifs". So I took the time to read all the news and make predictions on Gemini-3.5-Pro's release date, capabilities, context window, and price. tl;dr: I expect a release on July 1 (June 23 - Aug 6), with "Deep Think" mode to follow shortly. I expect it will be level with GPT-5.5. but behind Claude Fable on capabilities. I think it'll cost more than Gemini-3.1-Pro, but less than GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.8. I think it's 50/50 whether it will have a 1M context window or a 2M context window. (Justifications in https://futuresearch.ai/google-frontier-forecast/ ) I'd be most curious if anyone who currently doesn't use Gemini models would switch to becoming a Google customer after this. Because otherwise it feels OpenAI, and especially Anthropic, are running away with the market for top LLMs. https://preview.redd.it/32v1j583ag8h1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=acb5f4eecff81aaedb59b7e24b159ae78ea6ee2a