Gemini 4 Argon

I haven't tried it for coding yet, but I ran a couple of my recent curiosity driven queries from Claude (mostly used Fable and Opus 5.5) through it.

This is a clear step change, I'm genuinely amazed.

Its answers are to-the-point, logically structured, clearly written. Like a really well made mini essay on your question.

It also really likes to build little simulations / models that you can tweak the parameters on. Amazing to explore how different assumptions affect economic scenarios, for example.

It's also great at picking (sourced) illustrations.

I'll be using this for everything that isn't coding from now on.

I'm using this model via API. I am most excited about its ability to write the english language (or any language). My least favorite trend on twitter has been people posting 2D illustrations/3D renders as a proxy for model capability. Well-written prose is far less likely to go viral but far outstrips the ability to render a fantasy world in one shot.

I've been trying it out via the API and the model has been a delight so far. Clear in the head, not RL-fried, distinct writing style, and big model smell. That said, the em-dash is back w/ this model.

That said, I would be so frustrated with Sundar Pichai if I was on the Google team. The botched rollout of this model seems to be entirely a matter of capacity, and Pichai has been more than happy to give it to anybody but his own team.

I just created a Google account, which was a hassle. I tried to find an app and found AI Studio, but I’m not sure what that is. Then I found Antigravity, which apparently is Google’s alternative to Codex, and I installed it. Then I tried to buy the small Gemini AI Ultra package, but it didn’t let me pay. It accepted neither my credit card nor my PayPal account. It’s crazy how bad the Google experience is nowadays. You don’t know what to use or where to find it, and the security measures seem totally overkill. Am I really the only one having these experiences? Is Google aware of that?

> The model launches today at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens (with cached input tokens at 95% off).

Couldn't you just say what the price will be after the introductory period and when it'll take effect? Do they have some SKILL.md for these blog posts that requires the most important information to always be buried ten levels deep and hidden behind a login page?

People should appreciate Google more for how all of their models have:

- Natively multi-modality

- Enormous context windows

- Reliably cheap prices

It's like they don't release a model until it passes the above checklist.

Most providers have some mixture of these three occasionally, but with Google, every model is consistent. This kind of consistency is really nice to have.

Gemini 4 Argon is a new leader in Pareto-frontier. Looks like, Google is back in the race.

https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent/chat/pareto

For almost same intelligence (+15.56%, +15.18%), drastic difference in cost/task ($3.51 vs $0.41)

Image->html test for Argon. I'd put it at B tier, just under gpt 6.1 sol. It isn't A tier like Opus 5.5 or Astra.

Argon build: https://html.non.io/lcars-argon/

GPT 6.1 sol: https://html.non.io/lcars-gpt-6.1-sol/

Opus 5.5 (currently SOTA for this): https://html.non.io/lcars-opus-5.5/

Original designs: https://diffui.ai/app/canvas/5093e689-1e74-4f26-b632-2a4500f...

Unsurprisingly, the pelicans are excellent. Google are the only lab who have publicly shared that they have specifically trained for SVG output - https://twitter.com/sunjiao123sun_/status/202455551655137292... - and they've had great pelican results in the past too (which they have shown off themselves - https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/2024525132266688757).

Here's low, medium, high. Even low is better than pelicans from any other lab: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

low cost 10.185 cents, medium was 11.098 cents, high was 17.166 cents.

The costs are similar because it used more output tokens than reasoning tokens for all three pelicans, even for high.

Put it through my standard benchmark, a six step explainer... yes, in 3D.

Very fast.

Makes mistakes. Corrects the mistakes quickly with direction.

Google Argon 4: https://share.gemini.google/T9r6tr2dDaTE

I didn't have time to make it into a full blog post yet. Here is a previous one.

https://generative-ai.review/2026/07/kimi-k3-rush-test-vs-cl...

It's nice to have it available for more complex tasks, but I'll stick with 3.8 Flash thanks to its high output speed. I really like it for fast iteration and prototyping.

> built to solve your hardest problems

Like a working scroll on a webpage.

God damn this is impossible to use of safari mobile.

It's a great model. I have had it trying to decrypt the Voynich manuscript for the past couple of days without being biased by other research/other people's attempts. If anyone is interested: https://github.com/d2kx/voynich-research

Gemini isn't perfect but I find it a lot less annoying than other model families (personal preference or stockholm syndrome). Interested to read the reviews.

Is it actually available?

Of all models I like to write with Gemini the most. The language appears much more natural and elegant than what even Opus 5.5 or Astra do. Also, they give 5TB of cloud storage and discounts, it’s a steal for what you get.

The code is bad though.

Adding my five cents: initial usage through OpenRouter has been great. Very fun model to spar with, clever, intelligent. On par with Opus 5.5 but without the Claudism's and more of a Sol type of conversation. Though speaking of Sol, I've been very dissapointed with Sol 6.1 to the extent that I feel OpenAI has neutered it compared to a few months ago. Especially when giving it goals it will happily run in dumb circles just burning tokens without any real work.

Good God, man. Google has the worst frontier lab rollout of them all. And they're delivering products that are behind the curve constantly.

Now, I happen to believe that's an excellent strategy. I bet they actually resolve more LLM requests than any other company at this point. The lay person still uses Google exclusively.

Google continues to be the best in German language and Gemini 4 is a significant jump in our benchmarks

https://dach.peerbench.ai/compare?models=google%2Fgemini-4-a...

Gemini 4 Argon

As of my knowledge cutoff, three of the top state-of-the-art large language models are Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro, OpenAI's o3 (and GPT-4.5), and Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

I can’t try it because it’s not available on the free tier and no way in hell I’m tying a credit card to google, I’ll wait for argon-lite.

To everyone saying not available yet: it looks from the page like Pro and Ultra subscribers have it today and given the play links, it'll probably show up in the API in a few hours.

"Argon autonomously turns raw video to a physics-accurate simulation, estimating depth and physical boundaries, and writing the exact simulation code required to replicate those real-world environments."

This is crazy if it can work accurately.

A model that didn‘t break out of its sandbox and hacked other websites cannot be good.

The should ask Claude to make the page scroll faster.

I have the Free AI Pro plan from when I purchased my Pixel 11 Pro. I still don't have Argon in AGY nor web nor Gemini app. I have a free product and still feel cheated.

I ran it through my own coding eval today using pi/OpenRouter (11 small bug fixes from my own projects). It solved 10 of 11. Compared to Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol, a median run cost me $0.52 vs $0.18 for Sonnet and $0.09 for Sol, and took ~4 minutes vs 32 seconds and ~1.5 minutes.

It thinks a ton, ~24k output tokens a run vs ~3k for Sonnet. It missed a solution by thinking its way into a 10 min timeoout.

Something to look out for - if you're using pi, it doesn't have Argon in its catalog yet and reports cost at Kimi's rates, about a third of what OpenRouter actually bills.

Highly misleading to customers!

When you are on "gemini.google.com" there is a little lock icon next to Gemini 3 and Gemini 4. When you click it you get the prompt to subscribe (pay). Once you have successfully done so, the Gemini 4 option disappears!

Not sure who designed that specific interface but it's borderline fraud.

I'm a bit confused, all the announcements say that this is availabe to Ultra and Pro subscribers, but in antigravity, it's grayed out and says it's only available to Ultra.

I seriously doubt their ability to double API prices on Dec 1. Token prices are in a clear downward trend and Google should maximize revenue by competing for volume. Currently OpenAI is the only US frontier lab trying to seriously compete with open-weight models that you can run yourself for an order of magnitude lower than what frontier labs want to charge

I'm open to Google winning me over again, but there isn't enough hype in the world to do it. They will need to earn it after these disappointing 6 months.

Meanwhile, here's Gemini in practice:

Me: Gemini, navigate to nearest McDonalds.

Gemini: [Lists 10 McDonalds locations wnd asks which I want.]

Me: What were the priginal instructions just now?

Gemini: [Recites imperatives about tone and content from its memory system.]

Me: No. I told you to navigate to the NEAREST McDonalds. There's only one NEAREST McDonalds. Do that one.

Gemini: My mistake, navigating to the nearest McDonalds. [Opens Maps, navigating to a McDonalds across town.]

argon seems to be really good at spatial reasoning, it's catching really minute details which other models like astra and opus seem to miss.

build this scene space station docking scene https://x.com/_satyam_ai/status/2110097633922662752?s=20

https://shot.3e.org/ss-20261013_160043.jpg google's roll-out procedures on point as usual

Pretty insane that this isn't available for Pro subscribers on Antigravity, like not even a taste. Antigravity comes with a sample of Opus 5.5 too!

Adversarial programming language test for Argon. Surprisingly its safety guardrail gets triggered a lot just like for Fable 5.1.

    Claude Opus 5.5   58.7%
    Gemini 4 Argon    47.1%
    Claude Fable 5.1  46.7%

Language info: https://killswitch-lang.org/

Only available in the $100 plan, and it's worse than Opus 5.5? Why would you ever buy this?

I'm pro and I see that I need to be Ultra to use Argon :/

Announced two weeks ago and they went on a victory lap and they're already behind by the time they launched. Strange company, Google.

Google's models are by far the best for readable text but also for nuanced understanding of the input.

Even after using the free model in Google search talking to Anthropic or OpenAI models feels like talking to an ox.

I would love to try it out, and the Gemini models had previously been some of the ones I'd liked best in an overall sense, but unfortunately their updated inference endpoint is no longer ZDR on OpenRouter (change takes effect on the 18th). I think this is one of the more unfortunate turns in AI development in 2026, as it seemed like labs offering it was becoming the norm last year, and Google had previously done so consistently.

Maybe they could ask Gemini to fix their awful website to not crash on my phone!

Excited to finally see this out. When new big models come out I like to make them audit any other code I generated to see how things are.

As I approach a transitional period in my career, I'm reflecting on the managerial effort of places like google. How on earth do they keep an engineering org on the 'right track'? I work on products that are not as complex: fewer moving parts, fewer egos, no where near as novel. It feels like nobody does anything and nobody has any expertise

is it just 'Hire the right people'?

I made a NHL inspired hockey web game with Opus 5.5, and I let Argon loose on it to try and see if it could improve it, and it found a ton of bugs and improved performance and load times significantly. If anyone wants to play it here:

https://playblueline.pages.dev/

Only available on Ultra, so I thought maybe I'll try it for one month to see if it's good. Well, I have Google One and for some reason this means I cannot sign up for AI Ultra? This is just one of the worst product rollouts I've ever seen

Right now there are two top posts one about GLM-Legal and one about Argon. Both score about the same in the Harvey Lab test, but the prices are $0.15 versus $10.55, the $0.15 is Vals AI's estimate using the base model since GLM-Legal has not published prices.

Do we need to post every single model release on HN?

can't use in agy with Pro subscription:

Unavailable · Gemini 4 Argon is currently available to Ultra plan subscribers.

It shows a good improvement on my COCO object detection benchmark: 0.504 mAP zero-shot.

Gemini 3 Flash was around 0.403, 2.5 Pro was around 0.34.

I feel like if Google simplified their privacy/model training policy then their stock would go up.

It feels so complicated and hard to know what we can use vs what hands them our codebases