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Gemini 4 Argon (High): Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis

43 points theanonymousone 1 hour ago 21 comments

anuragdaram 1 hour ago | parent

Will have to check what the pricing would be for this model.

krat0sprakhar 45 minutes ago | parent

> Argon will launch at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens priced at 95% off input token price.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/ge...

1/5th the price of Astra and Fable

A_D_E_P_T 47 minutes ago | parent

Trading punches in the benchmarks with Mimo v2.6 and 6.1-Sol (both very cheap!), and decidedly inferior to Opus 5.5. I'm afraid this looks unimpressive. Rather comical that they're delaying its launch "for safety reasons".

thereitgoes456 38 minutes ago | parent

What are you talking about? It’s comparable to Opus 5.5 on “high” (54 vs 53; $1.82 vs $1.99), crushes every model except the most modern OAI/Ant ones, has way lower hallucination than every existing model and probably broader support for multimodal like existing Gemini models. This is so ludicrously off base.

asdfasgasdgasdg 37 minutes ago | parent

From the charts, it's similar in intelligence and cost per task to both Opus 5.5 (high) and 6-Astra (max). It would be better if it were more intelligent and less expensive, but I don't see a reason to expect it to have better performance than models released around the same time.

godbox 33 minutes ago | parent

To play the Devil's advocate, Claude loves chugging tokens, while Gemini appears to be quite a bit more conservative and efficient. I believe AA's price per task breakdown reflects this.

yipinwong 34 minutes ago | parent

I am still not sold on Gemini 4 Argon yet from the chart.

The price is enticing for cost per tasks, but let's see how it goes.

I have montly (cheapy) sub to gemini models and has been underwelming and lowered the tier.

dom96 28 minutes ago | parent

I'd love to run it on my benchmark but alas, Google not making it public prevents this.

godbox 28 minutes ago | parent

What a snooze fest. Another model that does not meaningfully improve on intelligence or price compared to its peers. Google has basically announced that they've "caught up" with the rest. I think they've been doing great work in the Flash department so seeing this is... underwhelming?

enraged_camel 24 minutes ago | parent

Based on some... rumors I've heard, this is their "Pro" offering. There is supposed to be an Ultra coming as well.

losvedir 21 minutes ago | parent

The only models beating it are on "max", while this is "high". There's no guarantee that those effort / reasoning levels compare, but there's almost certainly an "xhigh" or "max" version later which will score higher there.

augment_me 15 minutes ago | parent

I found that Google does not benchmaxx as much as the other providers. Of you look at real-case evaluation like lm-arena, even the 3.8 flash is often near the top despite its benchmark index being worse.

ai-x 24 minutes ago | parent

Note: Google can sell their tokens at cost if they really want to drive out competition, but long term they are better off by everyone making a healthy margin (and Google does a double-dip by also selling compute, services).

So, like any optimal game theory move, they are better off not starting a price war

pooper 18 minutes ago | parent

A slightly different question would be can they afford to "sit out" of any price war?

aliljet 24 minutes ago | parent

It's hard to not see this as a gut punch for OpenAI. They're lead was largely captured by scoring on value (by way of reset after reset) and now they're getting eaten up on price and being bestes and equalled on performance. I'll still pay a premium for Opus 5.5 right now because it's nearly unlimited use, but Google is the quiet sleeping king Everyone is happy to watch everyone else, but I'd wager google burns more tokens through their search product than basically anyone else and now they're just quietly pacing the frontier...

tomrod 18 minutes ago | parent

They own their hardware. That vertical integration alone probably saves oodles because they can reconfigure to their needs as opposed to individually negotiating data centre plans. I can't imagine the complexity both OpenAI and Anthropic have to maintain for their deployments.

zozbot234 13 minutes ago | parent

It's not as smart as Claude Opus 5.5 High according to the AA benchmark. Looks like a big fat nothingburger so far, though it's possible that future fine-tuned checkpoints of the same pretrained model will do a lot better.

aleqs 12 minutes ago | parent

> Opus 5.5 right now because it's nearly unlimited use

Anthropic has some of the lowest usage per $ in general, not sure what you're taking about.

jjice 2 minutes ago | parent

I don't think the OP and your comments are mutually exclusive. If Anthropic usage is lower, and the OP considers it basically unlimited for their case, that just means that they would have virtually unlimited usage with other plans.

algoth1 18 minutes ago | parent

The most impressive jump for me is in the low hallucination rate, which is specially impressive given how bad Gemini current models are on this regard

dang 18 minutes ago | parent

Related ongoing thread:

Gemini 4 Argon - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49913571