AI Release Calendar: Gemini 3.5, Watermelon, Astra, Fable 5.1
Astra, Watermelon, Gemini 3.5, Fable 5.1: which AI models will actually ship?
AI Weekly’s latest issue sorts the coming wave of AI releases into a practical list: what might ship, what could slip, and what's worth changing your plans for. OpenAI’s Astra is real, but some internal work is paused until stronger safety controls are in place. Meta’s next Muse Spark generation, Watermelon, is still training with far more compute and is supposed to arrive this year. Google’s Gemini 3.5 Pro is in testing but reportedly months behind schedule, while Gemini 4 is in pretraining. Anthropic’s Fable 5.1 has reportedly appeared in some accounts, and SemiAnalysis’s Dylan Patel theorizes that Mythos 2 has been used to train Mythos 3. Separately, Reuters reports that Chinese startup MiniMax is training what may be the world’s largest open-weight model—2.7 trillion parameters—with a release possible in the third quarter, though MiniMax declined to comment.
- OpenAI's Astra shows gains in agentic coding/cybersecurity, but internal work is paused until stronger safety controls exist.
- Google's Gemini 3.5 Pro is reportedly months behind schedule, while Gemini 4 is in pretraining.
- MiniMax may train a 2.7-trillion-parameter open-weight model, with a possible Q3 release.
Why It Matters
Track which models actually ship versus slip; delayed releases could shift your AI tooling plans.