I was interested (and slightly disappointed) to read that the knowledge cutoff for Gemini 3 is the same as for Gemini 2.5: January 2025. I wonder why they didn't train it on more recent data.

Is it possible they use the same base pre-trained model and just fine-tuned and RL-ed it better (which, of course, is where all the secret sauce training magic is these days anyhow)? That would be odd, especially for a major version bump, but it's sort of what having the same training cutoff points to?