Gemini 4 Argon

Gemini 3.1 is still SOTA at weird handwriting recognition. If Argon is better it will be amazing

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

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.

Digging in the model card, "Gemini 4 is the next generation in the Gemini series, a suite of highly-capable, natively multimodal, reasoning models. Gemini 4 Argon delivers frontier performance..." If they're using noble gases there are 2 obvious lighter naming candidates and 3 larger (or 4 if you count Oganesson). I'm not seeing them claiming Argon is the top/biggest/bestest model among the Gemini 4 series, just that it has frontier performance.

Edit: noble gases not noble taxes, though the latter would be a funnier naming scheme.

> Across Google and our early access partners, Argon is quickly becoming the preferred model for engineers tackling long-horizon software engineering.

"Across Google", wonder how much that is because of an effort by Google to curb usage of Anthropic models. MSFT and Meta similarly are pushing for in-house models. It doesn't mean the models are better when you push your engineers to dogfood and restrict access to other LLMs.

(Not that I know for sure this is the case, it's more of a hypothesis).

I gave the model my usual question of "I got a raise from X to Y, please explain what is the impact on my net salary". Answer was detailed and nailed all payroll edge cases, only to miserably fail in basic math at the end. It tried to calculate 430 minus 60 and got 410.

I hope all the people very concerned about AI safety are cheering this one. The best guard against one AI swarm taking over is having multiple adversarial orgs all with similarly advanced AI swarms.

I wonder if any of the AI safety people will begin encouraging AI researchers to swap jobs to work at a failing lab in order to keep them all extremely competitive with one another.

Wow, the site for the launch is horrible on mobile

I'm still waiting for a model which I can tell to "take these 3 screenshots and make a product launch video", where it doesn't randomly modify the screenshots or garble/rewrite the text as it moves the screenshots around the video.

Every time I try to generate one it's like a slot machine, where a different part will be messed up after fixing the first.

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

not available. classic google.

So who has access to it? The say Ultra and rolling out to Pro, but are those the Google AI plans?

What about the Google One AI plans? Will they get it? That has a Pro AI plan as well.

Any word on how fast it drains usage compared to openai/anthropic sub for the different tiers? I guess too early to tell?

Is there a benchmark for reverse engineering compiled programs? - Grader compiles a program to binary -> Agent has to reverse it back, and match all bugs and behavior.

Curious what this means for the anthropic ipo. Between this and meta, seems like there’s zero moat

It's available for gemini pro users.

It passed the test of using latest crystal-lang concurrent feature (with web search) when gemini 3.8 flash failed (again, with web search enabled). I think it is at least useful for coding, for sometime.

It still thinks Charlie Kirk is alive, though.

Pricing is interesting. At launch Argon is the same price as GPT-6 Sol, half the price of Claude Opus 5.5 and 1/5th the price of Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra.

But on December 1st Argon doubles in price - so it will be the same price as Opus 5.5.

> Our next era of frontier intelligence, built to solve your hardest problems

On safari the page doesn't scroll very well on the first section

All AI pages now include canvas animations. There isn't a single page without one. This is neither good nor bad, just an observation. I think OpenAI has the best animations so far, with Anthropic in second place. This one looks a bit off.

Here's how the 1M token output (long decode) works: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/long-decode

Does Google have a subsidized plan like others? If yes, is it only eligible for use through Antigravity?

not available yet. why to launch something that can never be used even after weeks

Does this solve the 2 year old bug of recitation hell?

It seems the model is a little verbose, using more tokens to complete a task that other similar models as stated more precisely in the linked article about Artificial Analysis's work on this model.

Here I was thinking Google had given up on frontier models...

Doesn't seem like anything special in my tests, not very different from the previous Flash models.

Google has too many options that may confuse users. I don't know if I should use Antigravity or AI studio or Argon for development

Which one is it?

The slides they show in the catering video demo are so bad (in addition to having all the usual signs of AI design), I would genuinely laugh if a supplier sent me this.

Finally, gemini 3.8 has been falling way behind opus and sol in my experience. It's showing up in my antigravity. My work account though still has 3.6, 3.8, 3.1.

Is this supposed to be the new Gemini Pro?

The previous gen pro used to have this weird tick where if you ask it a reasonably open ended question, it would number things in the response and assign each one some weird label starting with 'The...'

e.g.

    X: The Parameters
    Y: The "System"
    Z: The "Ongoing Grind"

Another quite unpleasant tick was that if you specify a peculiar term in your prompt as a conversational shortcut, it would keep repeating that throughout the conversation. e.g. "...What is a bitter lesson pilled way to do this?", then you'd see it will quote "bitter lesson pilled" at like 7 places in its response. This one seems to have eased off a little.

Does this mean Googlers will stop using Claude internally?

Not available in my browser/app yet (pro), but I'm confident it'll roll out soon.

That was a long wait.

Can’t even get it on pro tier in antigravity?

What’s the point lol. I’m not subbing to ultra to have it

at this rate we're gonna run out of stupid names for these things

"Hans, we're doing a new point release! What isn't crossed out on the periodic table yet?"

isn't harness as important as model these days?

I've asked Argon to do 3D model for me. It said that it can't do it. I've linked promotional materials and said that it actually can. It agreed and got me a model (not a great one). Man, why is Gemini like this? Every time I fall for the hype I get disappointed.

So like... do I get access?

Not available for me on Pro in the UK.

Just switched, and it seems to be much better. I'm hoping it stops lying. I have Pro max subs for Claude, Codex, Grok, and Google AI... I was forced into using Google by running out of credits elsewhere.

I have found that Gemini often claims it did something, but didn't actually complete the task.

I just had 3.8 Flash do a major refactor -- that never should have needed to be done in the first place -- and switched to Argon 4, and had it review it.

Almost everything had been stubbed out by 3.8, and none of it was properly integrated into the codebase. :facepalm:

Now when another uninteresting frotier model been released Google can finally start doing what we actually waiting for:

Start preparing Gemma 5 release.

I use Gemini all day at work via the chat interface. It's rock solid. I find it hard to understand which model it's using though. Am I already using Argon, or does it switch models according to the subject?

Unlike most people it seems, I like all the progress in AI but I really do wish they would reign in the over-the-top marketing. I mean, can we just get this stuff to the point where I can reliably work with it to design a well-architected software project without having to constantly struggle against bloat and nonsense directions no experienced or sane developer would ever take.

fyi: argon is an interesting choice of name, coming from the Greek argos meaning "lazy or living w/out labor".

Are they gonna go to Krypton or Neon next? Kinda started in the middle there.

Glad to see them abandon the absolute train wreck of their model naming "strategy".

Gemini Live vs. Gemini Lite vs. Gemini Pro vs. Gemini Flash vs. Nano Banana Lite (that one apparently has no Gemini prefix?)... Please, just pick a metaphor and stick with it without wildly mixing reasoning modes, model sizes, and input/output modalities in the model name!

can for the love of god we get some usage in cheaper subscriptions being Ultra tier only is annoying. I want to just test it out here, well will burn some money via api I guess.

Fable 5.5 about to drop the hammer on them and then another Astra version goes out lol.