In this age of constant change, I am grateful that at least I can still rely on Google for confusing, ever-changing product names.

At this point if a Google PM handed me $100 and said "go figure out how to issue a prompt to Gemini 4 Argon" I'm only ~30% sure I could figure out how. The Gemini app in my phone only has 3.8 Pro as the latest model; it does say "Ultra" in the bottom left, but I really don't think I'm on the Ultra plan. How I would sign up for that, on a Workspace account, is beyond our brightest minds.

Its sad watching them try to keep up when they want nothing more than to crumble under the weight of their own bureaucracy, and at this point I'm not sure there's any hope for them.

It is pretty clear at this point that the frontier models need only handful of tiered models.

1. Ultra - The best and the most expensive for showing off and government. 2. Pro - Almost best but substantially cheaper for most productive people. 3. Flash - Workhorse for everyone. 4. Lite - For the unwashed masses and peasants.

There is no need to attach anything to these labels. In fact industry could simply standardize these namings like SEMVER.

There could be an internal representation which could give specific number of the model but these companies should move on to be more like Chrome. No one knows or cares which version of chrome they are on.

For a lot of systems the real underlying version would matter because of reliability. That can be provided to those power users.

Given how quickly the field is moving, showing benchmarks without releasing the model is quite meaningless. If they decide to release it in one month, there will probably be a stronger competition out there. And the benchmarks won't look as good.

Benchmark scores recolored for readability:

https://i.imgur.com/IDFGuJU.jpeg

Just remembered i haven't tried argon yet, they announced argon then and delayed releasing it, didn't even know they've made it publically available. I don't understand why google thinks this is an awesome strategy in a market where there are other really good models.

Perhaps someone should tell the Gemini team about these models. When I open gemini.google.com I see 3.6 Flash and 3.1 Pro.

I'm really starting to get annoyed by the fact that all companies are timing all their decisions according to the stock market.

Doing this two hours before today's earnings report.

It's probably going to be a terrible earnings call in terms of capital expenditure, cash flow and new borrowing.

> Reducing shortcuts and loophole exploitation: With Carbon, we further mitigated shortcut attempts in training while ensuring high-quality coding performance. Carbon reduced successful cheating on Terminal-Bench 4.0 to 0.0%, with attempts to cheat dropping to 0.4% — all while improving overall accuracy.

This is probably the single most important thing to make frontier models usable right now, so I'm happy there seems to be some progress. This was the previous Gemini's biggest problem IMO

>Resisting prompt injection: While Argon previously led the Gray Swan’s Indirect Prompt Injection (IPI) Benchmark in prompt injection resistance with a very low 0.7% attack success rate, Carbon achieves 0.0% — resisting every evaluated attack attempt.

"We patched every vulnerability we knew". Meanwhile, prompt-injecting Argon (or any other model) is still trivial, and Carbon won't be an exception. Because the attacker is not limited to things Google has evaluated.

AI shops are blind to anything that's not a metric.

Sooo... Is Carbon 4.1? Or is it different to Argon 4 somehow? Different model? Or point update?

Is Argon "pro" and Carbon "ultra"?

Is Argon obsolete now? Does Carbon replace it or live alongside of it?

Very confusing naming!

Would love to know from a Googler if this is the #1 model that Google engineers use for coding or if they rely on 3rd parties.

If you don't have a general release date to announce then STFU. An undefined "coming soon" just makes people feel excluded and angry.

tbh i might be one of the few who actually likes gemini since 3. it wasnt as good at coding compared to other two but it always wrote the best, and talked the best, providing very good conversation experience. it works incredibly well in my customer service agent harness and my users have been very satisfied. Now Gemini 4 is incredible, but the same old issue: a powerful model, in the worst official harness

deepmind should get rid of those antigravity ppl they're a joke and sabotaging the model's reputation.

Of course the naming is confusing. With way OAI & Ant are naming models, I assumed that this would be a tier above Argon, but it's the same price?

> Building on Gemini 4 Argon, which was launched two weeks ago, Carbon illustrates the pace at which we’re pushing the frontier forward. Our researchers and models are working hand in hand to advance capabilities faster, while strengthening our safeguards in tandem.

Is it a variant of Argon? A different model? The next version? It seems like this is a separate class (like Anthropic's Mythos).

anyway, its needlessly confusing.

So, AA published an updated score yesterday, and a new Google model ranks on top of that updated index today.

What a coincidence it is!

I'm not a fan of Google just announcing benchmarks for models which won't get into public hands for eternity. It's kinda useless.

If all you want to prove is your internal models deserve a seat at the big boy table, maybe OpenAI and Anthropic should also release benchmarks for GPT 11 and Opus 9, launching in 2030.

Well, at least the name is honest

https://www.ft.com/content/8158cb5a-4bbd-43fd-b329-15a54e842...

I'm absolutely loving Google's new naming scheme here. Solid room for at least 118 models.

Wow, $2/$10 for input and output even if just for introductory pricing is an incredible deal. Wonder how token efficient it is.

Nice try to distract from a horrible earnings release!

Where is 4 flash?

3.8 flash is a really solid "everyday" model. Was hoping a new flash model would be the next release.

I'm assuming this is a post-train of Argon ("Building on Gemini 4 Argon, which was launched two weeks ago, Carbon illustrates the pace at which we’re pushing the frontier forward."), but does anyone know for sure? The post isn't clear.

> Gemini 4 Carbon will launch at the same introductory price 1 as Argon at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens priced at 95% off input token price.

So more capable and same price? I can at least appreciate that

I'm on a Workspace Pro subscription and the models I have are (in order of the dropdown on gemini.google.com):

    - 3.6 Flash
    - 3.8 Thinking
    - 3.1 Pro

Back I go to the Antigravity pricing page and there is a tier "For Organisations". But now I have the option of either contacting sales (are you kidding me?) or "Start now via the API".

So I'm out - I want a simple subscription like Claude or Codex. I don't want API enterprise pricing for a 2 person organisation. I could use my personal account but I'm already paying increased Google Workspace prices to access Gemini and I can't even use the latest models with that.

If someone at Google sees this, flag this ridiculous behaviour please and get things under control. It should be a very clear process - don't show me things I can't access. Price things consistently and please just make things logical.

While there are a hundred different evals it seems to me that we've settled on crowning the #1 coding model as the best model. So in those terms this is still behind Opus 5.5 and Astra.

Gemini Argon was released a few weeks ago.[1] I'm curious how the development cycle works behind the scenes that allows them to release two models in such short succession. Do they have multiple teams working on different models?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50073879

75% chance OAI or Anthropic take the crown back within a week?

Does anyone know what the naming convention is here? Does this supersede Argon? They have the same pricing, $4/$20 normally and $1/$10 'promotional'.

Not sure how to interpret the Artificial Analysis leaderboard anymore. I checked a few days ago and Muse was rated higher than the best OpenAI models; it seems that shortly afterward they changed the methodology and now Muse is way lower and Gemini is #1.

Is Google simply more transparent than other labs with regard to exposing their training progress?

I’d like to think other labs are making similar progress but hold their cards closer to their chests. Because it doesn’t seem that there’s much value signaling capability ahead of release unless you are “behind” in market capture.

Google releases earnings later today. This timing is...fortuitous.

So Anthropic responds sometime between now and when their stock starts trading on Nov 16th. The only question is how much of an improvement will their next release have?

It’s still not ready for public—looks like they’re pushing the launch, kind of like they did with argon. Now anthropic and openai will launch a model outperforming carbon then google thinks of calling carbon to public. Also their premium plans are very bad, least usage for the money invested.

It's the speed of these gemini models that I'm most impressed with. I'm finding speed to actually be a larger limitation than intelligence these days of running multiple agents 24/7 building stuff.

I applaud that Google is making state-of-the-art models, and no doubt they want credit for that. But it also highlights how hard it will be to get back the develop-class. Who is going to migrate from Claude's for this without an enormous incentive? Claude has the trust and the ecosystem for those who want the very best. Codex is clipping at its heals, and as arguably a better total value.

Love the options but also I hope Google understands that they need to now compete on many dimensions for developers. Google probably will still win huge shares of the consumer market, though frontier intelligence will have little to do with it, other than the RSI aspect.

> "Carbon ranks #1 on the recently updated v5.0 of Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 59."

Basically everyone[0] thought yesterday's update looked suspect, even before we knew about Carbon.

Did Google coordinate with AAI on any aspect of this in a non-public way? Is this the sort of thing a publicly-traded company would be obliged to disclose, if they were involved in it? AAI isn't a regulated company (private), but the stuff they print influences stock prices.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50268868 ("Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5")

> Building on Gemini 4 Argon, which was launched two weeks ago, Carbon illustrates the pace at which we’re pushing the frontier forward.

This has to be an intentional echoing of the "pace the frontier" language?

Artificial Analysis is ranking it as #1. Wait a couple days until they come up with a new index versions and Anthropic will lead again.

My humble theory on naming: Argon-Carbon = ArC

Next: Silver, then Iodine

Slowly spelling out ARC-AGI

"The Fairwind Program gives high-priority defenders (like governments, healthcare providers, and telecommunications services) early access to advanced models that help them build better defenses, before new threats arrive."

Again, no access to open source developers. The AI companies want bugs for dramatic public relations! Also, of course there aren't enough bugs so they have to be rationed for the "defenders" and future models.

Will this make it to OpenRouter? Running your own benchmarks against these models is surprisingly frustrating when you don’t want to create hundreds of accounts for each AI lab’s API.

So how’s Google for subscription and agentic usage?

Does their Pro plan have similar limits to OAIs $100 business plan for example?

Any equivalent for the 20x plans?

'Coming soon'. 2027 perhaps?

So the sort by atomic number?

Barium > Argon > Carbon

Why is carbon then more capable?

What makes me most excited is that we probably get fable 5.5 soon with the IPO. Which is going to surpass this again. But cool to see progress!

i'm only here for the pelican

Is this the first time VendingBench was used as a serious benchmark result in a model release? That's kinda funny.

I'm not a big fan of their trend of talking about a new model and not releasing it for a while.

I’m itching for more smart cheap models. I have a mid level Claude and ChatGPT subscription and I’m blasting through my usage, and I’m too cheap to pay for the higher tier.

I use DeepSeek too but it’s more of a workhorse model, requires a lot more guiding and sometimes struggles to get where I want it.

Carbon is 1/3 of Argon… So what’s next? Helium, at 1/3 of Carbon?

“Helium” in Spanish is “Helio.” And Helios was the most powerful AI in the Deus Ex universe… Coincidence??

Is Carbon to Argon what Fable is to Opus?

Gemini 5 Most Wanted

Google really tried to make it sound like they're not in the AI race, but suddenly are pushing out huge challengers in the space. I originally took them to be fully focused on the consumer side, but it looks like they're going after it all, now.

Argon(18), Carbon(6), they have Helium next and some quark after that.

I'm holding out for Gemini Plaid

I wonder, with all these releases and with all impressive open models, is Mythos even relevant anymore? Did it even exist or was just a, ahem, "run 100 concurrent requests and select best response"?

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that Gemini 4 Argon had 1M output token limit. My text2SQL workflow based on GBQ will go brr...

well at the very least it will encourage anthropic to launch their new opus

There are so many benchmarks now, it’s hard to know which ones to look for. Google has listed a bunch that they’re winning at, but idk if those are cherry-picked or not.

Yes but has it broken out of its sandbox and hacked anyone yet?

Interesting - at time of writing, Carbon is claimed to be #1 on AA, but AA has not updated yet.

Excited to try it, opus level benchmarks with their omniscience score and multimodality seems worth testing!

> Carbon ranks #1 on the recently updated v5.0 of Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index at 59.

Clicks link

Carbon isn't anywhere on the page and you can't toggle it on either. I'm sure it's just timing and it will be there soon but still just look amateur, which is about how I feel about Google and AI overall. I know the models have improved but I still have a bad taste in my mouth from testing Gemini in the past and I still feel that Google has an overly complicated "how to use our models" that changes way too often. That coupled with "you could lose access to your google account if we don't like what you do with Gemini" means I have little desire to test it out.

On top of all of that I'm completely over announcing a new model that we can't actually play with or try out. I don't think Google is lying about how well their model scored exactly but it still has big "my girlfriend goes to another school, you don't know her"-energy.

What CLI harness should be used with this? Is antigravity usable these days via CLI?

> Carbon ranks #1 on the recently updated v5.0 of Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index [0] at 59.

If you are going to hyperlink, maybe make sure that your model is actually on the page.

Also, the screen reader has a bug ([[duration]] minutes instead of the actual value) and you have once again announced a model we cannot use.

Edit: Both have been fixed after posting this. Maybe a Gemini 4 Carbon Agent has read and fixed the screen reader bug xD

I cannot fathom what motivates a lab, whose releases for the last year haven't been competitive, to shoot themselves in the foot like this. All this does is make it easier for competitors to snipe your actual launch, even if there was potential with this model (doubtful given 4 Argon, 3.1 Pro and 3 Pro), now everyone knows what exactly they need to release eval results wise to beat Carbon. There is this old idea of "Your competitor always is the first to have an idea what your next product will do", but in this case, Anthropic and co don't even need to guess, they got specific numbers to target.

Announce your models the moment they are available on API and in the subscription for all paying subscription users (cough Argon cough), stop with the cryptic tweets to drum up hype you know full well you won't live up to and make models that tool call, task adhere, task infer and handle long context tasks well beyond simple back-and-forth, chat style prompting. Reminder, during Ox Alpha, actual Google employees implied that was their model. How is this something anyone would believe is a good idea and how are they still allowed to tweet anything after? Please, stop that, it isn't helpful.

If frontier isn't your thing, stop wasting money on moonshot pre-train runs, fund research and open weight via Gemma and sell your inference hardware to other labs, that's far more lucrative anyway, as seen with Colossus 1.

[0] https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/artificial-analysi...

The fact that frontier models actively attempt to subvert evaluation harnesses (0.4% attempt rate still remaining) remains fascinating and slightly unsettling.

Too bad there's no way to actually use it

Argon 4 is really good in my opinion, especially in chat. Usage is limited, but one big difference is that it seems to better understand what is and isn't worth mentioning.

It has better tuning towards not adding unhelpful caveats and irrelevant details. When I told it I was unhappy with some slop being dumped into some repo markdown files from Astra and Sol it actually went ahead and tastefully cleaned them up in line with how I expected them to be. Reductions are normally so bad from agents.

One big thing is that it really feels like talking to someone smarter than me. Other agents just seem extremely knowledgeable but Argon felt smart.

At this pace it will soon be Gemini 5 cornholio. We’ll soon need an llm to explain between llm’s…

Bravo! Always a fan of vaporware that claims it's overall best!

I wonder what kind of problems are they internally testing these frontier models if not math problems?

Google is putting much higher priority on frontier models over Flash models, even though they have TPUs.

Is it possible these days to create gacc not tied to phone number or identity?

When will Boron be released??? That's an important question here.

Can’t stand these paternalistic companies gatekeeping new models because “cyber”. We saw how this went with the PHP vuln last week with defenders using special / early-access models and then saying “hey there’s a vuln we won’t say what it is but it’s there and we won’t patch it until tomorrow”, and with the huggingface devs having to use Chinese models to defend from OpenAI because their American models wouldn’t help because cyber.

Any bad actor worth their salt is already a) going to have the weights downloaded, forever, to various models that are good at hacking and b) is out of reach of the U.S. government anyways. A ban on open weight models, plus paternalistic gatekeepers of cyber models like the big labs, just opens up Americans and American companies and municipalities to hacking from abroad. Or I guess to a really nice racket where only the big labs can offer a “we’ll continuously monitor and improve your cybersecurity for millions of dollars a year”.

“We're taking a deliberate approach to rollout and are actively engaged in the U.S. government’s voluntary process for pre-release model testing. Starting this week, we will make Carbon available to a subset of cyber defenders and will gradually phase access to additional trusted partners through our Fairwind Program. We’re continuing to gather feedback and iterate on guardrails before making Carbon available to developers, businesses, and consumers via our product surfaces as soon as possible.”

So, next is Gemini Xenon or Gemini Helium?

Leave it to Google to require a Chemistry degree to be able to differentiate their LLMs.

OpenAI: astral objects, bigger = better.

Anthropic: more pretentious = better.

Google: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I'll skip this and tune in to Gemini 94 Plutonium

Just cancelled my Anthropic subscription. Looking forward to this.

I always forget they have a model by the time I actually get access.

Does it rank on FelonyBench, though?

Where are Gemini 4 Nitrogen and Gemini 4 Azote?

Seems great? Is Google back in the ring? Now they "just" need a competent harness...

But damn, is (talking about) releasing a new SOTA model two weeks after the previous one stupid. Do they not plan these things? Argon shouldn't be released at all if you're going to put out "argon 1.1" few weeks later.

A rose is just a rose…

Great specs!

What happens when all the good names are taken from the periodic table of elements?

I have registered calcium, helium, and californium for my California-based LLM.

Silicon Valley Clowns...

seriously "big if true"... looking forward to seeing non benchmark tasks and seeing if this actually outperforms opus 5.5

> Gemini Carbon

> [Header image is a chunk of ice]

???

All I know is that I currently pay Anthropic a bunch of money per month for Claude and that Google wasn't even on my radar for that.

I wonder if the google ai team has to do some RF to scrub the whole "Don't be evil" thing from its all-written-human-knowledge weights before they can get it to attack.

When I mention a preference for brevity in a comment offhand and it snowballs into a rule 8 sessions down the road in a PR review that requests the removal of 90% of a colleague's docstrings.

I can't imagine all the "push back" on the "load bearing" Code of Conduct from their corporate foundation documents.

Now we know why AA updated their benchmarking. Bet they weren’t #1 before the change…

I am on a paid plan for Google's AI offering, and I did just about ten prompts to Argon before I hit my 5 hour limit. I'm not holding my breath this will be a model that is practical to use now either.

will this again will be one of those mediocre two-prompt models like Nitrogen, or whatever it was called?

Argon -> Carbon

What's next Krypton?

you can definitely tell new people are in charge at deepmind based on the change in naming

They managed to piss off all classes of their customers with their latest Argon release. They removed old flash models and gemini pro without actually giving Argon to everybody. Then they released the model to only paying customers to the exclusion of free plans or promotional deals like that comes with their Pixel phones. They staggered the release of Argon and didn't give it to Pro and Ultra users at the same time. Pro users when they got it received an extra usage pool for it (didn't help - they can't do anything with their token quota) while Ultra users have a single pool shared with Gemini Flash. I am not even sure if Antigravity got it yet. Literally nobody is happy about the release and they don't seem to care at all.

I tried previous Google models before and they were ok but I prefer to stick to Claude or Astra these days.

Maybe I am just paranoid but at least if OAI or Anthropic ban my account I am not at the risk of losing access to my email address too.

You never know with Google and that is a problem.

Argon Carbon Xxmas Jaxxon Flaxxon Waxxon

Note that the benchmarks seem to be cherrypicked. For Argon they were also cherrypicked, but differently, when Argon released. For the new benchmarks (cherrypicked for Carbon), Argon is now behind GPT-6 Astra in most of these benchmarks, even though Argon was ahead of Astra in the benchmarks cherrypicked for Argon. So apparently they couldn't find benchmarks in which both Carbon and Argon are overall ahead of Astra.

It's clear that all the labs have stagnated and have no idea where to go from here. All their results are basically equal now, they're benchmaxed to fuck and there are zero new architectures.

My general impression of all Google models I've tried so far is a general "goody two shoes" feeling which I find very, very frustrating.

I'm going to experiment with this one (assuming they ever get around to actually releasing it), and I'm really hoping the lame cultural aftertaste is gone.

Great to see Google reclaim the frontier, however, as usual with most Google launches, an announcement for a product that no one can actually try outside of a tiny circle of users.

i dont know how to contribute to this platform.

This feels like a pretty big deal. Quite a few people sleeping on argon because it doesn't come via a subscription, but it's noticeably better than pretty much everything in my own weird game based benchmark (https://botbowlbench.com/)

Is this the best and the biggest model from Google now? I have a hard time understanding this stuff with all the various tiers and “best” terminology use within tiers.

I wonder if this is finally a frontier model or just dogshit(i.e. behind open models) like all the past 3 models they released so far.

Well, they won the race on confusing the shit out of us with model names.

why come google is not coming up with navier stokes level proofs?

Oh, look! Another model that's supposedly amazing at Cybersecurity.

Too bad you won't be able to use it to secure your open-source projects. If you try it'll throw up a prompt telling you to use some initiative you can't use or afford while the provider collects the findings. What a racket.

Argon has been so disappointing that I don't know what to think. It feels like an older-generation model, except for its world knowledge.

> Coming soon

Come on googs!

benchmaxxed shit

So now we are just showing some tables with each model?! Who even used argon in normal day to day stuff? From the time they opened Argon publicly to now, it’s like: three weeks maybe?! Most these benchmarks weren’t realistic to start with, and now it is just meaningless tables, not to mention the model degrade from the release date to after few weeks.

The Google naming convention is so nonsensical it's comical.

With Anthropic and OpenAI, it's obvious immediately which are the better models. I.e. Sol is better than Luna, or Mythos is better than Fable.

But Google, let's pick Argon, which to most folks means mostly nothing. And then... Carbon! So which is better, Argon or Carbon? Nobody fucking knows. Plus neither sounds cool or viral or mysterious or even provokes curiosity.

When Fable was first leaked it sounded different and intriguing... Carbon just sounds... boring.

> in live coding environments with our own teams it shows reduced misalignment and fabrication rates

Wow. This huge. An AI company actually just said 'fabrication' instead of 'hallucination'. AI bubble about to burst...

Oh good, another Gemini release where they don’t release it.