YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Gemini 4 Carbon

374 points acossta 1 hour ago 317 comments

blovescoffee 1 hour ago | parent

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

eldenring 1 hour ago | parent

> 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

Fergusonb 1 hour ago | parent

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!

inknight 1 hour ago | parent

I don't trust AA scores after the last update to the index. Specially now that they are including private benchmarks that no one can test by themselves but only trust the entity doing them.

Marha01 51 minutes ago | parent

I don't like it much, but I understand. It's the only way to be objective. Models are trained and benchmaxxed on any popular public benchmarks.

JacobAsmuth 35 minutes ago | parent

You'd prefer public questions and answer sheets that anyone can train on?

verdverm 1 hour ago | parent

AA just updated their intelligence index to v5

https://artificialanalysis.ai/articles/artificial-analysis-i...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50268868

https://theainewsreport.com/2026-10-28-artificial-analysis-i...

IMO it emphasizes the wrong things if we are interested in "intelligence"

machiaweliczny 1 hour ago | parent

I think it's best ranking of models so far

verdverm 46 minutes ago | parent

yea, I probably agree, but I also do not find it represents real world use and performance

There are many more aspects which affect outcomes

kilroy123 1 hour ago | parent

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

cbg0 1 hour ago | parent

It does seem like a very uncompetitive approach.

ActionHank 1 hour ago | parent

"I have a girlfriend, you just won't know her because she goes to another school"-type energy.

joshstrange 1 hour ago | parent

Ha, I didn't see your comment before I posted mine [0], there were still only 2-3 comments when I opened the thread but yeah. I completely agree. I don't think they are lying, but I still don't love the "it's the best, but you can't try it".

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50277040

WarmWash 1 hour ago | parent

Google is way more risk adverse than the smaller labs, because the punishment for slip ups is dramatic.

They cut down 1.5sq miles of man made logging forest that was rezoned to industrial land (and sold to google), without getting the right permit first, and it's been international news for almost a month. Anthropic and OAI are still small fish, at least publicly, so they can get away with far more. If Gemini was doing the shit OAI was doing with agent hacks and the like, there would be congressional hearings and $10B in european fines.

When you are a megacorp, perhaps here even the megacorp, every mistake you make is worth millions to someone, the government, the media, individuals, or all of them

SecretDreams 1 hour ago | parent

While I don't disagree, if we are to believe Anthropic's valuation claim, it squarely falls under "megacorp" territory.

newspaper1 1 hour ago | parent

I'm going to say that deforesting without a permit is quite a bit worse than not releasing vaporware.

This isn't about a "slip up", it's the modus operandi for Google since it was young. Press releases instead of real releases. I can't count the number of times I've clicked on a "launch" story from Google on HN only to end up on a blog post with an embedded youtube video, and nothing else. Google just doesn't get it, and this is one of the many ways that manifests.

_aavaa_ 1 hour ago | parent

> deforesting without a permit

> man made logging forest

This isn't an old growth forest, these are trees planted specifically to be cut down.

newspaper1 1 hour ago | parent

They cut down part of a forest without a permit. That is a factual statement. It doesn't matter what kind of trees they were.

0ddj0b 1 hour ago | parent

Absurd mental gymnastics here - of course it matters (and on wholly-owned, non-public land as well).

newspaper1 15 minutes ago | parent

You think Google should just get to do whatever they want? I don't. Get the permit. We should throw everyone responsible into prison.

WarmWash 42 minutes ago | parent

The point is that if the local commercial developer cleared the forest without the permit, it probably would not have even caught the ear of the local news. They pay the fine and move on. Happens all the time in bureaucratic systems.

Clearing the forest and failing to get the permit are two distinct events here. Google is in trouble for failing to get the permit. Not for clearing the trees. Everyone on both sides was aware the trees were coming down. Think of it like camping at a campsite without getting a permit first.

Failure to get a permit is non-news for almost every entity on Earth. Except when you are megacorp, hence my comment.

newspaper1 15 minutes ago | parent

> Failure to get a permit is non-news for almost every entity on Earth.

Corporations should not break the law, period. Weird that anyone would defend that.

_aavaa_ 11 minutes ago | parent

It is a factual but actively misleading statement.

The forest was put up specifically to be cut down. The default state for these trees was to be cut down.

If you can’t see the difference between this and clear cutting of something like an old growth forest, then there’s nothing left worth saying to you.

cman1444 19 minutes ago | parent

Disagree. 1.5 sq miles of forest is miniscule. Shouldn't even be local news where it happened.

newspaper1 14 minutes ago | parent

I'm very, very glad it was news. We need to know when Google is breaking the law. Now let's hold them responsible.

dannyw 1 hour ago | parent

You’re also assuming the decision is up to Google.

I’ve heard from multiple labs that model release is up to the US government now.

You can also see this with Astra being announced and then launched a few days later.

jstummbillig 1 hour ago | parent

Nobody is forcing Google to announce a model before they are cleared to release it.

WarmWash 50 minutes ago | parent

It's totally possible, especially with meeting all the major heads had with Trump a few weeks ago.

I imagine they all want to avoid uninformed knee-jerk legislation, so preventing a "three mile island" type incident that would freak out society and congress would be common ground alignment between all the labs.

The air around AI is already dense, but it would suffocate the industry overnight if something like a large scale financial attack or grid attack took place.

ur-whale 49 minutes ago | parent

> When you are a megacorp, perhaps here even the megacorp, every mistake you make is worth millions to someone, the government, the media, individuals, or all of them

I don't buy it.

SpaceX is not exactly a small corporation, and they nevertheless strike me as far less risk-averse than GOOG and they deal with actual hardware that actually effing explodes.

deanc 1 hour ago | parent

I’m not a big fan of their trend of talking about having released a model and then it being unavailable for paid AI plus subscribers for months.

sroussey 1 hour ago | parent

Deepmind creates these, Google Cloud productizes them.

If Google Cloud was in charge, Gemini 5 would be public, and they wouldn't be messing with Gemini 4 nor 1M context when they have 10M internal. C'est la vie.

tex0 1 hour ago | parent

Show me the 10M internal, please.

bushbaba 1 hour ago | parent

10M would be huge. I have soo many use cases that could leverage it. Pls ship it google if your listening.

mixtureoftakes 1 hour ago | parent

google, pls. Please

igleria 1 hour ago | parent

this is like a rumor of a rumor at this point

guelo 56 minutes ago | parent

A 10M window would require dozens of GPUs (or TPUs) dedicated to each query. That is something that Google could afford internally but wouldn't be able to scale to an external product.

delegate 1 hour ago | parent

I have stopped even clicking on their launch links.. it's always something that's not available right now or 'not yet available in your country'..

Anyone can promise the moon in the future.

__jl__ 1 hour ago | parent

I think Artificialanalysis should have a policy of only including available models or something. They already include Gemini 4 Carbon now even though nobody can access it. Google can celebrate that they have the highest scoring model. Fable 5.5 and Astra 6.1 will probably be released before Gemini 4 Carbon and might well outperform it...

jeffbee 1 hour ago | parent

Everything at Google rolls out incrementally to different populations of users so no matter what feature they are announcing there is a good chance you can't see it yet. When they announced Gemini 4 Argon it was 2 days before I could use it.

esafak 45 minutes ago | parent

That's a best practice, but they should start rolling it out before they announce it. At that point it should be "generally available".

jeffbee 7 minutes ago | parent

Try sundar@google.com

igleria 1 hour ago | parent

Yup, no way to tell if this carbon is a diamond or just coal.

zf00002 1 hour ago | parent

Especially since at least to me, Argon is a clear tier below current Claude and Sol.

thisisauserid 57 minutes ago | parent

This let's them talk about it on their earnings call in a few hours.

Peteriishak 1 hour ago | parent

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

informal007 1 hour ago | parent

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

spyckie2 1 hour ago | parent

Makes sense - Flash models are (mostly) distills of the frontier model capability.

If they were able to make flash 3.8 so good off of their 3.1 pro model, flash 4 will probably be really good. But ofc you'd want your pro model to be as strong as possible in coding so that flash can take all those gains and efficient-ize them.

vatsachak 1 hour ago | parent

The better frontier you have the better distill you have because traces are of higher quality.

It's why Opus 5.5 is a beast

nickandbro 1 hour ago | parent

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

miyuru 1 hour ago | parent

it says on footnote "After the introductory period expires, the price of $4 per 1M input tokens and $20 per 1M output tokens will apply."

brainwad 3 minutes ago | parent

But if they keep releasing a model every month, then the frontier model will keep being perpetually half price?

JacobAsmuth 40 minutes ago | parent

You can check out the token usage on AA. It used ~30% fewer tokens than Opus.

nprateem 1 hour ago | parent

> 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...

htrp 1 hour ago | parent

Argon -> Carbon

What's next Krypton?

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

aldanor 46 minutes ago | parent

former deepmind ceo having received a nobel in chemistry, perhaps a coincidence?

tschellenbach 1 hour ago | parent

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

herunan 1 hour ago | parent

Is Carbon to Argon what Fable is to Opus?

Ryan5453 1 hour ago | parent

It's the same price, so it seems more like Argon 4.1?

Ryan5453 1 hour ago | parent

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?

KPGv2 1 hour ago | parent

We all need to go back to numbered versioning. I've been on macOS and have to check every time I need to know what OS I'm running. High Sierra, Monrovia, Yosemite, who the fuck knows I've spent two days in California my entire life. I also shouldn't need to know what minor version I'm on to discuss my OS's capabilities. 26.2 is what I'm on now.

flakiness 1 hour ago | parent

They seem to go with Android-style alphabetic order code names instead of pointed numbers (4.1, 4.2...) and drop "B" for some reason (which is creating this confusion.)

KeplerBoy 1 hour ago | parent

Can't wait for Gemini 4 Darmstadtium

yegle 57 minutes ago | parent

Dilitium would be cool.

WarmWash 1 hour ago | parent

Rumor is B was apparently Boron but Carbon beat it to the punch

yegle 58 minutes ago | parent

B was briefly an internal version

pantalaimon 30 minutes ago | parent

Arrg but the period table already has a natural order, sorting elements alphabetical isn't exactly intuitive - although fitting given the parent company.

speedstyle 1 hour ago | parent

'Coming soon'. 2027 perhaps?

aix1 1 hour ago | parent

The previous model, Argon, was announced on 30 Sep and released on 13 Oct.

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

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

cesarvarela 1 hour ago | parent

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.

SwellJoe 1 hour ago | parent

The problem with Argon, that makes it feel like older models to me, is that it stops and waits for confirmations far more often. If run (in a VM or container) in the dangerously skip permissions mode, it gets a lot less annoying. It feels quite smart and thorough, to me, though still lagging Opus 5.5. I'd be fine using it instead of Opus for most things.

This post explicitly says that's been improved in Carbon. So, here's hoping. Google currently has the most generous usage limits on their $20 plan among US providers, so it's a pretty good deal.

fshr 1 hour ago | parent

I wonder if it's better in Antigravity? Their harness might help some? I haven't tested Argon out.

SwellJoe 46 minutes ago | parent

I'm talking specifically about using it in Antigravity CLI.

staticman2 57 minutes ago | parent

> Google currently has the most generous usage limits on their $20 plan among US providers, so it's a pretty good deal.

Are you saying when you use Argon in antigravity it has generous token usage? I forget if I tried it with antigravity but my experience with using it as a chat bot was the usage limit was terrible.

SwellJoe 40 minutes ago | parent

Yes. For similar tasks using Antigravity+Argon vs. Codex+Astra vs. Claude+Opus, Gemini has the most generous limits on the $20 plan. Since the ChatGPT limits got nerfed last month (or whenever, I can't keep up), the $20 ChatGPT plan is very stingy. With similar tasks I'd see 2x-3x faster consumption using Codex+Astra vs. Antigravity+Argon. I could casually code all day on the $20 Gemini plan, using Argon on Medium, without ever bumping into the limit, which is not true of ChatGPT or Claude $20 plans (but used to be true of ChatGPT). If I were using automated tools and doing a bunch of things at once, I'm sure I could saturate it, but I don't think most humans are very good multitaskers even with agents doing most of the work, so I tend to stay pretty engaged with what's happening and while the agent is working, I'm spending time looking over the previous work, testing, editing docs, etc. I'm not juggling five projects at once, most of the time.

The order of generosity, as it seems to be from my limited testing is currently Gemini->Claude->ChatGPT. (And, if we're including Chinese subscriptions, Kimi is below all of those. Very stingy.)

thefourthchime 1 hour ago | parent

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

Topfi 1 hour ago | parent

> 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...

causal 1 hour ago | parent

I imagine there is immense pressure to announce taking the #1 spot while they still have it. It's probably better than releasing a model that hasn't been properly vetted, but I agree it's annoying.

Topfi 1 hour ago | parent

Fair point, though if they are still vetting, that'd likely also entail some post training or at least the addition of a filter, should they find something they do not like. As we've seen with Fable 5 and Opus 4.8 Fallback, that can significantly affect user experience and benchmark scores.

So if they are still vetting and changes can thus happen, that'd mean the score could change for better or worse. Not sure they'd want the embarrassment of a #1 score changing after announcement.

tanseydavid 26 minutes ago | parent

There is an earnings call today for Alphabet.

gengelbro 1 hour ago | parent

Oh come now, this rolled release is now the standard for frontier models. Also, the fact that AA hasn't updated their page is not a scandal, just a launch day hiccup.

joshstrange 1 hour ago | parent

> Oh come now, this rolled release is now the standard for frontier models.

Sort of? Yes, OpenAI has been bad about slow rolling but Anthropic's last few models have been available essentially at the same time as they announced it. In most cases I updated Claude Code and was using the new model right away.

Compare that to OpenAI who sometimes says "Available to all Plus/Pro/etc plans" without saying anything about "rolling out" and then it's a crap-shoot on when access will actually roll out. That said, they have gotten better, it used to be 1-3 weeks sometimes to get a new model/feature they announced was available for your plan.

And then there is Google... Who loves to talk about models like this and then give no timeline for release. Even when they do release the models it's miserable to find out how to even use it. Is it in the API? Which API? Google Cloud/Vertex/Gemini Cloud? Whatever it's called this week? Coding plan?

No, what Google does (or rather fails to do) in its rollouts does not compare to OpenAI/Anthropic.

As for the AA page, it's just embarrassing. Any smaller company doing that would get roasted, Google doesn't get a pass, learn how to coordinate or wait for something to actually be true/live before posting.

Topfi 1 hour ago | parent

There was none for Fable 5.1 and the time between Astra announcement and availability was a few days.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic also have a bit more credibility to make such moves, making minor delays while unnecessary and self-defeating in my view, at least not as egregious.

I will say that I dislike how OpenAI releases model only for Work and Codex but not via Chat, Anthropics "everywhere all at once" strategy is I feel the most paying user friendly.

Gemini 4 Argon took weeks to come out and when it did, paying Google AI plan users couldn't access Argon on Gemini or Antigravity.

mattlondon 1 hour ago | parent

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

It's on my screen. Try asking your agent to refresh the page.

Topfi 1 hour ago | parent

As written, both issues were fixed ten minutes after I posted the comment.

odie5533 1 hour ago | parent

We're reaching the point where models are only going to hold the number one spot for hours.

Topfi 1 hour ago | parent

I honestly still need at least a week before I have a decent picture of GPT-6.1 Sol performance. The announcement pace is truly insane.

Wheen 1 hour ago | parent

AA has also lost all credibility to me with all of their index changes being unannounced and following an open weight model getting close to the top spot. I gave them the benefit of the doubt for v4.2, but to do this again immediately after Kimi K3.1 got into the top 5 is a little too suspicious for me. For Opus and Astra to stay at about the same score while everything else drops feels like they are adjusting weights specifically in their favor.

Even in the optimistic case that this isn't some conspiracy, it highlights how arbitrary their scores are. I had trusted their previous ratings and their new index shows that even AA doesn't agree with them. What's to say this new index is any better and won't just change drastically again?

Imustaskforhelp 59 minutes ago | parent

gemini 4 carbon has now come on the artificial analysis page. I think that I had checked it 5 minutes ago and it wasn't there.

For historians, The blog post is 31 minutes ago so we can say that it was true for 20-30 minutes.

Slightly embarrasing but it seems to be the case that the model is actually worth what they were saying on AA. It's just that it is not available to people and I think that Anthropic and OAI will release a better model to public before google might.

AA has tons of its flaws too and the recent shift to their new v5 has been nothing but controversial for many.

rcr-anti 1 hour ago | parent

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'.

WarmWash 1 hour ago | parent

Rumor is that boron existed, but was quickly superseded by carbon. Obviously they are going with alphabetical element names.

treis 1 hour ago | parent

This seems like an odd thing to do / a hell of a lot of people are going to learn Dysprosium is an element

breppp 56 minutes ago | parent

Should have gone with Chromium

gcanyon 19 minutes ago | parent

I heard they're going to skip D and go straight to the element Earth...

jawns 1 hour ago | parent

I can understand alphabetical ordering in some circumstances, but if the point is to indicate which model family is lighter or heavier, surely atomic numbers should be taken into account?!?

Argon - 18

Boron - 5

Carbon - 6

I don't think I'll be able to cope with this level of elemental disorder.

VulgarExigency 59 minutes ago | parent

It's gonna be even worse then they name the 11th iteration Potassium.

brainwad 31 minutes ago | parent

They'll never get there since there's no J at all ;)

WithinReason 57 minutes ago | parent

The naming is elementary, my dear Watson.

ahsillyme 6 minutes ago | parent

I thought Carbon for composable stood well on it's own marketing. As did Argon, for impervious. Next to one another the pair comes off utterly cockeyed and sleazy.

jlhawn 21 minutes ago | parent

There aren't any _good_ elements that start with the letters D or E. Imagine if they name the next one "Dysprosium" where the Greek root translates to "hard to get at" or "difficult to access" reflecting how difficult it was for its discovers to isolate it in the late 19th century, but also sounds kind of untrustworthy to give an AI model such a name.

bananaflag 1 hour ago | parent

I guess it's just a diss on competitors.

joshstrange 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

Marha01 50 minutes ago | parent

It's already there.

saberience 1 hour ago | parent

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.

gengelbro 1 hour ago | parent

> I.e. Sol is better than Luna, or Mythos is better than Fable.

Oh yeah incredibly clear that a mythos is better than a fable /s

saberience 1 hour ago | parent

Mythology implies gods etc, Fable implies a something more like a fairy story.

That's fairly obvious to me. Most people associate Myth with the gods, which are kind of the biggest and most powerful things we can imagine.

Not so much of a stretch...

aleksiy123 43 minutes ago | parent

I think it’s relative size of literary work.

Mythos > Fable ? Opus > Sonnet > Haiku

Tho I think it’s definitely not obvious at first glance. And requires some thinking to order if you are even familiar with the terms in the first place (I had to look up opus)

flowerlad 1 hour ago | parent

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

It is not obvious to me at all. I like Apple's naming more: iPhone Pro Max is better than iPhone Pro which is better than iPhone.

Sol vs Luna, how am I supposed to know which is better? Is sol a word, what does it mean? Same with mythos and fable. How am I supposed to keep track of these names across multiple companies? Why can't they use Claude vs. Claude Pro vs. Claude Pro Max?

crazysim 1 hour ago | parent

I mean, I can explain Sol vs Luna. Sol is the sun, it's huge. Luna is a moon, it's small. Terra is earth, in-between.

flowerlad 22 minutes ago | parent

Sol means "sun" in Spanish and Portuguese, but that wasn't obvious to me as an English speaker, I had to look that up after you said Sol is the sun.

aleksiy123 44 minutes ago | parent

Yeah I think the op is overestimating the effort it take to order them properly especially cross culture.

The ordering seems to be based on size?

I actually like the google one. Alphabetical categories. Essentially alpha beta without the existing connation.

I think the bigger problem it’s getting harder to order models linearly. As later versions of the model make different tradeoffs across dimensions.

sergiotapia 10 minutes ago | parent

That korean dude ruined pro max for me forever lol

crazysim 1 hour ago | parent

I wish they would just call it 4.1 .

acoustics 1 hour ago | parent

Seems to be alphabetical

vatsachak 1 hour ago | parent

Yeah whoever names these things at Google needs to be fired.

Mythos -> Fable -(sketchy)-> Opus -> Sonnet -> Haiku mostly checks out

Astra -> Sol -> Terra -> Luna checks out

Carbon ?? Argon

thway15269037 51 minutes ago | parent

Someone in some previous thread tried to summarize, e.g. "Sol < Astra, except when 6.1 Sol which is more that current Astra, but Terra 6.1 > Sol latest, and..."

So no, OAI scheme is also confusing as hell. And they are going to add even more confusion when they release presumably Nova.

Andrex 4 minutes ago | parent

I feel like I focus on the version numbers and Flash label for Gemini more than the attached cutesey codenames.

4 > 3.8 > 3.1 > 3.0

Unless you put Flash onto it, which denotes a lower cost version.

It seems like Carbon is a drop in replacement for Argon (same price). They can keep using random cutesey names as long as the version number + Flash naming scheme keeps making sense. Feels Android-y to me.

droidjj 1 hour ago | parent

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.

notatoad 1 hour ago | parent

the rumour mill the last two weeks has been referring to carbon and argon as "checkpoints" of the same model

alex_duf 1 hour ago | parent

are we that much in a rush that we need to release checkpoints this close? or maybe argon was a little rushed?

iamdelirium 1 hour ago | parent

That's generally how models are made. There's several candidate checkpoints and experimentation going on.

yewenjie 1 hour ago | parent

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

dyauspitr 1 hour ago | parent

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.

gavinray 1 hour ago | parent

Benchmark scores recolored for readability:

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

tidbeck 52 minutes ago | parent

Zoomed on the image and Imgur now also requires an app…

froddd 51 minutes ago | parent

And is not viewable in the UK. Not hitting a lot of points in the shareability league

Imustaskforhelp 50 minutes ago | parent

I am not @gavinray but I have downloaded the image from imgur and uploaded it to catbox.moe, hope this helps!

https://files.catbox.moe/2aqfk7.webp

(Edit: For some reason the previous jpeg link: https://files.catbox.moe/yjqa0a.jpeg wasn't working and catbox.moe was just downloading 4kb white screen so I converted the image to webp and reuploaded it on catbox)

cubefox 20 minutes ago | parent

Thanks. Nobody should be using Imgur anymore. I would recommend ImgBB as alternative, or your suggestion (Catbox):

https://imgbb.com/

https://catbox.moe/

Anyway, Imgur creates so many problems that it should be retired.

Groxx 38 minutes ago | parent

yeah, they've been quite logged-out hostile for a few years now. not quite as bad as instagram, but they seem to be holding that as their guiding-north-star...

jsphweid 49 minutes ago | parent

On one hand this looks like a joke?

On the other hand I'm a strong protan colorblind guy (red doesn't register to me very well at all).

Anonyneko 29 minutes ago | parent

Without color blindness it looks fine, green-yellow-orange-red. Having checked on a random website what a protan colorblind person might see, yeah, I get your confusion...

https://file.garden/auI5UdLIWwZSu5X8/pilestone.png - result of said simulation.

philrenaud 42 minutes ago | parent

Serendipitous timing, but I've been building a little chrome extension [0] for doing exactly this sort of thing (highlighting tables automatically, especially when numbers don't necessarily correlate good=green, bad=red). Model pricing and comparisons are one of the main things I checked (low cost good, high benchmark score good).

[0] Practical Data (https://practicaldata.dev/ / https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/practical-data/oeoo...)

alienbaby 23 minutes ago | parent

am i missing something or have they updated the page? the blue highlights and grey arent that bad to read?

james2doyle 1 hour ago | parent

> 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

lordolunch 1 hour ago | parent

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.

fallat 58 minutes ago | parent

They really were the sleeping giant and I think everyone understood that - OpenAI especially, hence their need to scale up hardware as much as physically possible. Google is trying their best to keep their heads down and focus on their lane. It's starting to pay off, but I'm sure they've felt the heat more than once.

LUmBULtERA 43 minutes ago | parent

>pushing out huge challengers in the space

I thought it's not actually available to anyone? They announce huge challengers, but they don't exactly "push" them out...

Culonavirus 1 hour ago | parent

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.

PreciousH 1 hour ago | parent

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.

carterschonwald 1 hour ago | parent

it’s pleasant

ur-whale 54 minutes ago | parent

> it’s pleasant

for whom?

solarkraft 52 minutes ago | parent

They’re not the only ones to do it, so I’m guessing their idea is to double-dip attention.

For me it also works the opposite way, when it actually comes out eventually it’ll already be old news.

nater5000 50 minutes ago | parent

For what it's worth: Argon is a pretty good model, and this is coming from someone who just sticks with Opus 5.5 mostly across the board. For the current introductory price, it provides an exceptional value. Looks like they're trying to release Carbon (which is apparently a significant improvement) at the same price as Argon, which would be a crazy value.

It's worth trying if you have easy access to it (we use Cursor at work, so it was just a matter of picking a different model for me). Don't know if I'd go out of my way to get a Google AI subscription for it, but if Carbon ends up meeting these expectations, then it may be worth doing so.

seizethecheese 45 minutes ago | parent

We're working on a battle system for local coding agents [1] and Argon is really bad. Literally the worst model in our initial ranking, and Deepseek Flash, Muse Wonder, Grok are all in there.

Top is Opus 5.5, followed by Fable.

[1] https://github.com/bottomless/agent-duel

iamdelirium 38 minutes ago | parent

This does not mesh with other battles like Arena where Argon is nearer to the top.

seizethecheese 15 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, we are doing something different and actually running parallel local coding agents head to head, something Arena doesn't do.

ricericerice 36 minutes ago | parent

That doesn't seem to match the arena.ai rankings, who I'm assuming has a far larger dataset of rankings than you currently hold.

https://arena.ai/leaderboard

seizethecheese 16 minutes ago | parent

You're right Arena.ai has far more data. Our data is actual local coding agent head-to-head battles, so I think our quality is far higher.

Their agents leaderboard is literally just randomizing the agent and looking at metadata like tool call errors. In my opinion, it's poor quality data in high volume.

Their web dev leaderboard is in cloud containers, most people don't run agents like that.

I ran a statistical test on our data. Deepseek vs. Argon. Posterior probability DeepSeek 4.1 Flash is stronger: 99.1%.

nater5000 28 minutes ago | parent

Well, my perspective is somewhat narrow (I use it primarily for software engineering and pretty technical data engineering work), so it's possible that Argon is well-suited for the work I do but not for other tasks. I suppose it's just more data points to consider.

seizethecheese 16 minutes ago | parent

Our data is all software engineering run via local coding agents, but yeah your specific use case could be one where Argon is stronger. (Or your personal preference.)

zf00002 10 minutes ago | parent

my anecdotal experience is that argon and muse wonder full are both a full tier below opus/sol.

seizethecheese 6 minutes ago | parent

So far in our data, there's no difference between Wonder and Sol 6.1. This is with wide error bars, as we're just getting started. Note this is Wonder, not Full as it's not on openrouter yet.

But yes, Opus is a tier above Wonder and Argon with very high confidence.

thanhhaimai 14 minutes ago | parent

It's important to note that Argon works best on Antigravity Harness: https://x.com/wenhaocha1/status/2114559544156205413

It's best to start with a relatively clean GEMINI.md too. Many configs optimized for Claude doesn't work well because Argon didn't have those same failure modes.

seizethecheese 12 minutes ago | parent

This would make sense. In our local coding agent battle system, Argon is tanking, and this is running on opencode, importing agents.md and claude.md.

skerit 31 minutes ago | parent

It's Google. They can't help themselves. This is what they do.

david-gpu 28 minutes ago | parent

I paid for their lowest-cost subscription, thinking that it would give me a small quota of use of their most recent flash models. Instead, they give me an unnecessarily large quota of their old models, which I have precisely zero use for given that open-weight models are better and cost next to nothing.

Consequently, I have zero intention of renewing my Gemini subscription. What a dumb business choice they made.

closetheloopdev 11 minutes ago | parent

I agree. Announcing a new model without immediate availability or a definite release date seems confusing than just doing it later. When Carbon is made GA, OpenAI or Anthropic might just release their new model, and we'd be like: Carbon what?

Having said that, I don't see people excited about using Argon so far, so that might be why Google is announcing this to hype Gemini up a bit.

MisterMunchkin 1 hour ago | parent

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.

wmf 1 hour ago | parent

Didn't looped transformers come out a month ago?

Marha01 49 minutes ago | parent

> all the labs have stagnated

Lol. The performance increase in the last 6 months has been massive.

WarmWash 1 hour ago | parent

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

MostlyStable 1 hour ago | parent

Polymarket [0] thinks it's 55% Anthropic, 38% google by the end of the year. Anthropic /OAI 62% combined.

[0] https://polymarket.us/event/company1-2026-12-31

mlinsey 57 minutes ago | parent

That market resolves using the arena.ai text leaderboard, where Argon was already #1 over Opus 5.5. Coding is way more economically consequential, and I think the current gap between Anthropic and Google is very wide there (at least, before this Carbon release)

MostlyStable 40 minutes ago | parent

That's a good point. The coding specific question (which still uses the arena.ai leaderboard, just the coding version instead of text version), has Anthropic at 66% at Anthropic/OAI at just shy of 80%. That's probably more representative even if Arena.ai isn't my favorite benchmarking site.

Actually....looking in more depth I may have to upgrade to something stronger than "not my favorite benchmarking site". The first OAI model on there is GPT 5.4 at 31....that's not really credible.

https://polymarket.us/event/code1-2026-12-31

arjie 1 hour ago | parent

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

LewisOrton 1 hour ago | parent

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.

cotillion 1 hour ago | parent

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.

minimaxir 1 hour ago | parent

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

theanonymousone 1 hour ago | parent

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!

cardboard9926 53 minutes ago | parent

Also deliberate mention of AA index and featuring it in benchmark table. Neither of which was done for Argon [0].

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

case540 40 minutes ago | parent

I mean if you're #1 on a table you are more likely to mention it.....

edot 1 hour ago | parent

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.”

WarmWash 54 minutes ago | parent

I think you need to either be naive, selfish, or ignorant to think that giving the equivalent of cybersecurity nuclear weapons to everyone is smart plan.

Obviously we want to be vetting the parties that get to use these weapons, because we want them to only be used as tools.

Mind you that Kimi in it's latest release nerfed cyber capabilities, as they stated. It doesn't make sense for China to be loose with this either.

cotillion 42 minutes ago | parent

And these models are deployed in a large number of data centers, with thousands of employees and on millions of GPU:s. The GPUs are built abroad and shipped to the datacenter. Billions are likely spent by China and Russia to get their hands on these weights, one could argue that ripping off the band-aid now is the only way forward.

zarzavat 1 hour ago | parent

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.

doodlesdev 48 minutes ago | parent

Only available to Google AI Pro subscribers. Google AI Plus hasn't got Gemini 3.8 Flash nor Gemini 4 Argon.

cubefox 9 minutes ago | parent

What's then the use of the Plus subscription?

dada216 34 minutes ago | parent

I have a pro subscription and got Argon about two weeks after the announcement, I'm on the annual plan, got the 30% discount by switching it from monthly. Usage on antigravity is not included, usage via chat is absymally low. It's a good model though.

david-gpu 26 minutes ago | parent

I have a yearly plus subscription and I am still seeing 3.6. I am not renewing it once it expires. Why not give subscribers a small usage quota of their latest flash models?

zarzavat 22 minutes ago | parent

The borg cube does not understand customer satisfaction.

jeremyjjj 15 minutes ago | parent

It should be available on Pro in Antigravity now.

It has a seperate weekly limit that is very low. Maybe it can be pulled off that usage tier and just regular usage since Carbon is being released?

Havoc 12 minutes ago | parent

Now if only I could sign up for a pro plan…

Unfortunately their plan structure is on par with their model naming.

The plans that allow for own domain and the plans that allow for sane AI use are mutually exclusive

Matl 25 minutes ago | parent

They recently made it so you're stuck on 3.6 Flash if you don't pay them enough.

_puk 12 minutes ago | parent

It's all moot soon:

Updates to your Google AI Plus plan

We wanted to let you know about changes to the models that you can access with your Google AI Plus plan.

Starting on 1 3 N o v e m b e r 2 0 2 6 , the ability to select Pro models in both the Gemini app and AI Mode in Google Search will only be available to Google AI Pro subscribers and above. You'll still have access to our latest Flash-Lite model and Flash, built for speed and intelligence. Your previous chats using the Pro model can be continued with a different model.

To learn more about these changes, you can visit our Help Centre article for additional details. You can manage or cancel your subscription at any time.

Thank you for being a Google AI Plus subscriber.

jascha_eng 1 hour ago | parent

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!

paxy 1 hour ago | parent

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.

dbgrman 1 hour ago | parent

> 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.

chapz 49 minutes ago | parent

I also have no clue based on naming where this fits in, maybe it's their Claude Haiku competitor. Who knows.

JacobAsmuth 44 minutes ago | parent

What are you confused about? This model is the same price and speed and token usage per task of Argon but scores better in ~every test.

pantalaimon 32 minutes ago | parent

So why not call it Argon 4.1?

WarmWash 1 hour ago | parent

Where is 4 flash?

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

mattlondon 30 minutes ago | parent

Agreed. I was really looking forward to 4 Flash. 3.8 Flash has been my favourite model and daily driver for a little while now.

But to be honest I am now not sure if Argon was the flash model and this Carbon is pro? It's very confusing.

threepts 1 hour ago | parent

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

SimianSci 58 minutes ago | parent

Google doesn't have Venture Capital it needs to keep pleased while it delays its IPO.

I_am_tiberius 1 hour ago | parent

Just cancelled my Anthropic subscription. Looking forward to this.

ac29 54 minutes ago | parent

Its a paper launch, Argon took a few weeks from when it was "released" to when you could actually use it in agy

I_am_tiberius 45 minutes ago | parent

yes, but my Anthropic subscription also still takes 2 weeks to be effectively terminated.

cedws 1 hour ago | parent

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.

solarkraft 49 minutes ago | parent

I heard Argon was bad at executing plans but good at making them. Sounds like a potent combination to me.

leetharris 46 minutes ago | parent

The challenge is that our bar for "smart" keeps going up and up.

If you compare to "smart" from a year ago, you have endless options that are basically free at this point which outperform everything from a year ago.

Deepseek Flash V4.1, Sonnet 5.5, GPT6 Luna, etc are really strong for the cost.

Stevvo 59 minutes ago | parent

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

solarkraft 47 minutes ago | parent

You see, I will release a really good model some day. It’ll get like 300 on AA.

laimewhisps 5 minutes ago | parent

I'd go one further, if you're not actually releasing it, then STFU. Google's working on a model? Yeah, obviously. If I can't use it today, they need to just keep their mouths shut. I'm tired of their vaporware.

solarpunk_enthu 59 minutes ago | parent

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.

stbenjam 50 minutes ago | parent

I can't tell if they're withholding access to manufacture some sense of scarcity but the delays are really prolonged. I'm nervous to use Gemini models anyway, as its attached to my Google account and I've seen too many people having their whole account banned for dubious reasons (with little recourse).

Also the whole "we're only releasing it to cyber defenders first" framing is weird, is any Gemini model an actual cyber risk?

bitpush 47 minutes ago | parent

Isnt it about risk?

Just because you saw your friend move to a new country for a job doesnt mean you will make the same choices, even if you are similarly qualified.

hiddencost 42 minutes ago | parent

They released Argon shortly after announcing it, so I think some benefit of the doubt is reasonable here. They claim they're already evaluating it via the government.

I suspect they're announcing it for two reasons: to get ahead of all the leaks; and because it's earnings report day.

user43928 39 minutes ago | parent

Doesn't Google have a particularly bad record recently at making their models publicly available?

Especially on their Plus tier for Gemini.

I think it's a fair concern that this might take weeks and trail Fable 5.5.

spankalee 37 minutes ago | parent

They released Argon shortly after announcing it, so I think some benefit of the doubt is reasonable here.

hiddencost 30 minutes ago | parent

I think the majority of traffic is from Enterprise customerd that goes through their API. Their consumer facing products do lag, but I don't think they care.

pseudosavant 10 minutes ago | parent

100%. They don't even suggest a release timeline other than "we look forward to bringing Carbon to developers, businesses, and consumers soon". Claude and GPT-6.x will no doubt have improved versions by the time "soon" comes around.

Has there ever been a product category where a product release is valuable for a shorter time than with LLMs? Trying to build SOTA models seems like it'd be an exhausting hamster wheel to work on.

thefounder 58 minutes ago | parent

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.

javierhonduco 57 minutes ago | parent

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.

brainwad 52 minutes ago | parent

People I work with either use the dogfood versions of Pro models, the latest public Gemini versions, or Opus 5.5. It's a personal preference thing, we have public usage dashboards and you can see some people are 100% Gemini, some are 100% Claude, some are using both.

ur-whale 46 minutes ago | parent

> some people are 100% Gemini, some are 100% Claude, some are using both.

Does that mean Anthropic now has a copy of Google's source code?

[EDIT]: thanks to people in the know for their answers.

Follow-up question:

if Anthropic models run in a Google cage, does that not also mean Google can distill Anthropic models even easier (both fast and unseen)?

rfw300 44 minutes ago | parent

Google offers Anthropic models hosted on GCP through their Agent Platform (fka Vertex AI) - presumably any internal Anthropic use never crosses the Google boundary.

iamdelirium 44 minutes ago | parent

No, GCP has been selling Anthropic models for a while (and soon to be OpenAI models).

brainwad 44 minutes ago | parent

AIUI our Claude traffic runs on GCP and so never "leaves the building".

yegle 48 minutes ago | parent

I personally use 3.8 Flash most of the time and Argon/Carbon when I need to do deep analysis or research an ambiguous problem. Opus/Fable is used when I need a second/third opinion.

3.8 Flash + /boost is very capable.

vinni2 47 minutes ago | parent

From what I heard from a Googler, Claude models are still the most popular for coding internally but it’s a couple of month old info so take it with a grain of salt.

slipshady 46 minutes ago | parent

Googlers got access to Claude like one month ago.

mattlondon 32 minutes ago | parent

From what I've heard they have been using it since at least Opus 4.6, if not earlier

brainwad 13 minutes ago | parent

It was locked down to GDM only for several months, but now it's available for everyone.

eddd-ddde 14 minutes ago | parent

Personally, any of the flash options is my default most times because it tends to perform tasks faster and with the same level of success.

owkman 14 minutes ago | parent

Other comments on this already, so this is more of a confirmation.

I'm not going to comment on others use of Carbon except to say some article that came out before Argon's external launch saying Googlers hate it was nonsense. Not to say everyone loved it all the time.

I use Carbon heavily and am quite happy with it. For complex designs I may have it and Opus iterate back and forth on the design. They have their own strengths and Opus 5.5 is great, but I use Gemini far more than I do Opus at this point. I know a lot of the jagged edges of Gemini better than Opus though, so take that as you will.

crimsoneer 56 minutes ago | parent

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/)

ur-whale 54 minutes ago | parent

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.

blinding-streak 53 minutes ago | parent

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

TuxedoBuddy 44 minutes ago | parent

That's how it works

Ozzie_osman 52 minutes ago | parent

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

brainwad 30 minutes ago | parent

Yes: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c607l0k72rlvo

How do you do fellow frontier models? </meme>

mattlondon 52 minutes ago | parent

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!

NickNaraghi 51 minutes ago | parent

Carbon is like Opus

Argon is like Sonnet

bsiverly 46 minutes ago | parent

Helium will be small and squeaky I presume

qt31415926 46 minutes ago | parent

I'm surprised no one at Google realized that both OpenAI and Anthropic's naming schemes follow a fairly clear progression and that they should do something similar to reduce confusion. I would have assumed the opposite given that Argon has a higher periodic number

kylestanfield 35 minutes ago | parent

Lots of commenters here are confused by Luna, Terra, and Sol still haha.

johanyc 11 minutes ago | parent

That's on them imo. The point is consistency

Jtarii 10 minutes ago | parent

It isn't obvious that a fable is "better" than an opus either.

cubefox 5 minutes ago | parent

Originally the model tier that was better than Opus was called Mythos, which makes sense. Fable makes no sense, since a fable is just a small story with animals. They should have used "Legend" rather than Fable.

mattlondon 46 minutes ago | parent

So Argon was 4.0 Flash effectively? Interesting that there is such a small gap between their new Pro and Flash tiers

hiddencost 40 minutes ago | parent

I don't think that's right. Carbon and Argon have the same price.

I suspect they're using a new naming convention because they had previous contractual obligations tied to the "pro" and "flash" naming, and by switching to a new naming schema they avoid those commitments.

atakanaluc 30 minutes ago | parent

Both seem to have the same pricing: $2 in / $10 out initially, rising to $4 in / $20 out after the introductory period. That made me wonder whether Carbon might be Argon with additional RL training. What’s the Opus/Sonnet comparison based on?

MrOrelliOReilly 52 minutes ago | parent

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

ReptileMan 44 minutes ago | parent

Argon - first version, Bismuth - internal, Carbon - second version for the public if I had to make a wild guess.

Corence 35 minutes ago | parent

Other sources say that what was publicly released as Argon was already the second version named Barium internally. So there was a separate internal Argon and public Argon was Barium. Not confusing at all for them! https://www.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1x292ly/a_new_che...

ReptileMan 26 minutes ago | parent

Still better than Anthropic. If I create someday doomsday device, its turn off code will be to sort Anthropic models by strength given only their names, without access to the internet.

post-it 6 minutes ago | parent

I found Anthropic to be pretty intuitive.

sheepscreek 27 minutes ago | parent

Clearly, Google has already fired their marketing department and Gemini sucks at this job.

Maybe it thought the names are clear and intuitive (for an LLM perhaps).

dymk 13 minutes ago | parent

Ah, so the next will be Dubnium

bitpush 44 minutes ago | parent

How is this any different than terra, sol etc or leopard, yosemite etc, or model x, y, 3, s ..

user43928 41 minutes ago | parent

Would it have been so hard to call it Gemini 4.1 or 4.5?

siva7 39 minutes ago | parent

Then how would you compete with Anthropic and OAI with such boring names?

codessta 37 minutes ago | parent

Don't know about the leopard and model x, but at least in the case of OpenAI luna > Terra > Sol > Astra is a pretty obvious size progression.

But I come from a latin language background, so maybe I'm a bit biased there.

sheepscreek 31 minutes ago | parent

    Luna  = Moon
    Terra = Earth
    Sol   = Sun
    Astra = Galaxy

joaogui1 28 minutes ago | parent

Astra means star, like the Sun

stavros 19 minutes ago | parent

"Stars", if I'm being pedantic.

melasadra 24 minutes ago | parent

I didnt know this but apparently Astra is the plural of astrum (latin for star).

leontalbot 4 minutes ago | parent

Cannot wait for Universe and Multiverse levels.

VTimofeenko 29 minutes ago | parent

At the risk of taking a geocentric position, my gut feel is Terra -> Luna -> Sol -> Astra. Sorting algorithm is distance from observer.

Size wise Astra is not categorically bigger than Sol, both in absolute terms and the observed size.

__mharrison__ 9 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, this was my initial thought as well... I guess they didn't ask anyone before choosing the new naming scheme. But that isn't particularly surprising.

israrkhan 2 minutes ago | parent

FYI, Model S, 3, X, Y is an acronym for S E X Y.

sauwan 7 minutes ago | parent

terra/sol or opus/haiku give an indication of size (the sun is bigger than the earth, opus is larger than a haiku). Carbon is smaller than argon (periodic table speaking), so that's no longer a helpful way of thinking about the model sizes...

saberience 42 minutes ago | parent

Ah yeah, Carbon it's so OBVIOUSLY a superior element to Argon!

tux3 30 minutes ago | parent

You must have missed Mendeleev's less well-known Alphabetic Table of the Elements!

ben_w 24 minutes ago | parent

I think some sarcastic responses to Mendeleev at the time actually suggested this.

laybak 40 minutes ago | parent

this captured the sentiment of my first reaction as well

vdfs 33 minutes ago | parent

Atleast we stopped hearing "copilot"

Lucasoato 32 minutes ago | parent

Next version: Gemini Tokyo Drift

Nihilartikel 30 minutes ago | parent

Gemini: Capricorn

ReptileMan 25 minutes ago | parent

Gemini - Alignment Drift

needforSp33d 18 minutes ago | parent

Gemini Hit Pursuit 2

whatthejesus 5 minutes ago | parent

Gemini Fox on Socks on Knox on Box.

moffkalast 22 minutes ago | parent

Anyone still remember Bard? Google would probably desperately want us to forget lmao.

giancarlostoro 19 minutes ago | parent

I don't mind Carbon, Argon kind of throws me off because my brain autocompletes to Argonian... I still have no idea what the different ones from OpenAI mean. Can we just go back to "Silver, Gold, Platinum" for naming things? Something simple we've all understood, always.

brookst 12 minutes ago | parent

I'm kind of disappointed they haven't hit on releasing some models under the Alphabet name. That'd really stir things up. Then maybe Nest after that.

thisisauserid 5 minutes ago | parent

They should at least tell us the atomic mass they're using.

If it's based on carbon-14 it will lose half it's model weights in 5,730 year; if it's based on carbon-12, it's a stable release.

thway15269037 48 minutes ago | parent

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"?

user43928 30 minutes ago | parent

Mythos is Fable and you can see on the chart that Fable 5.1 is no longer at the frontier.

peri-cl 48 minutes ago | parent

> "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")

bitpush 45 minutes ago | parent

Dont companies always talk in private? Like, Apple having a business meeting with Meta is not nefarious nor out of the ordinary. Companies coordinate on things all the time. Why is that surprising to you?

peri-cl 34 minutes ago | parent

AAI styles itself as being independent of the companies it's evaluating.

jawiggins 48 minutes ago | parent

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.

tamimio 48 minutes ago | parent

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.

kingstnap 45 minutes ago | parent

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.

ur-whale 43 minutes ago | parent

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.

cvladan 43 minutes ago | parent

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.

mlmonkey 22 minutes ago | parent

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

Now you know why they released it just before the earnings call.... :-D

dainiusse 42 minutes ago | parent

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

dom96 41 minutes ago | parent

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.

FrameworkFred 40 minutes ago | parent

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.

kevinkoning 37 minutes ago | parent

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.

PunchTornado 33 minutes ago | parent

My view is that the llms aren't sticky. I switch from one to the other daily. frequently auto which selects the cheapest option. When codex came with sol the entire team switched instantly. Then opus 5.5, the entire team switched instantly. We have a channel on slack where somebody says which is the best cheapest model today and I usually use that.

eleventen 31 minutes ago | parent

I had to google how the hell you even use these. Apparently “antigravity” is their suite of agentic products and Gemini CLI is dead and it’s the same situation where a google AI plus subscription is only useful inside the antigravity tools. No Pi/OpenCode support at all.

Whatever. Pass.

molszanski 30 minutes ago | parent

What ecosystem? How can one vendor oneself into one provider / model? Those harnesses and features are kinda the same.

andriy_koval 30 minutes ago | parent

> 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.

Both A and OAI regularly screw devs on quota. Switching for many is easy, you just run agy cli instead of claude/codex, and enjoy Ads free youtube and music + 20TB of google storage.

piyh 29 minutes ago | parent

Antigravity also is far and away the worst coding harness I've ever used.

Robdel12 26 minutes ago | parent

> Coming soon

Come on googs!

secondary_op 26 minutes ago | parent

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

trvz 26 minutes ago | parent

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)_/¯

tempestn 24 minutes ago | parent

> 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?

anticensor 22 minutes ago | parent

Where are Gemini 4 Nitrogen and Gemini 4 Azote?

orbital-decay 19 minutes ago | parent

>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.

brainwad 17 minutes ago | parent

Not just AI shops. All large organisations, software or otherwise...

GodelNumbering 16 minutes ago | parent

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

DanMcInerney 15 minutes ago | parent

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.

ltph0 15 minutes ago | parent

"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.

cubefox 12 minutes ago | parent

Also it isn't clear why governments would just use these models for defense. It seems very likely they would use it for offense as well. So the Google's framing is off.

drakmo 14 minutes ago | parent

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

cubefox 14 minutes ago | parent

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 was overall ahead of Astra.

paaloeye 12 minutes ago | parent

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

sergiotapia 11 minutes ago | parent

Argon Carbon Xxmas Jaxxon Flaxxon Waxxon

sergiotapia 11 minutes ago | parent

Gemini Quattro Quattro

n_u 11 minutes ago | parent

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

twelvenmonkeys 11 minutes ago | parent

i'm only here for the pelican

paaloeye 8 minutes ago | parent

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