YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Gemini 4 Carbon is now available

114 points meetpateltech 44 minutes ago 47 comments

gimlichgu 39 minutes ago | parent

Maybe add (2026)?

nothercastle 37 minutes ago | parent

Is it 100$ a month for the minimum plan that has access

kingstnap 32 minutes ago | parent

Yes.

> It is also rolling out to all Google AI Ultra subscribers

However for what its worth the $20 plan got Argon like a day or so later.

vardump 11 minutes ago | parent

Yes, and it worked for a chat query or two. Then 5 hour wait.

guidopallemans 36 minutes ago | parent

A nice nod to simonw in one of the highlight videos;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNbkThtNzS8

faccacta 29 minutes ago | parent

That's awesome. Will models be pelican-maxed from now on?

baal80spam 25 minutes ago | parent

Obviously. The next step after pelican-maxxing is AGI.

adg001 24 minutes ago | parent

If this is not the end game when it comes to bike riding pelicans, I guess we are close enough. :-)

beernet 6 minutes ago | parent

For OAI and Anthropic releases we usually get a "pelican" here in the comments pretty (suspiciously) quickly, which then also happens to be on top of the comments. I always found that pretty weird given that's not an actual model "evaluation". It's provocative and gets the people going, I guess.

This happens not so much when Google or other labs release (not even on the Argon release post, afaik). Make of that what you will. Not sure if Google is sending a nod or a wink... ;-)

byefruit 35 minutes ago | parent

Just checked my Gemini app, still only have 3.1 Pro, 3.6 Flash and 3.6 Thinking on Pro. Looks like it's Ultra only.

They've been so slow to update their top models and roll them out that despite subscribing to the Gemini Pro plan, I use it so rarely that this is my last month. That and their product offering was so confusing I basically gave up.

eitally 34 minutes ago | parent

I pay for Ultra and have been using Argon for a couple weeks. I just checked in both Agy and Gemini and Carbon is there for me now, too. I'll try it, but Argon is itself already so slow that I'm not sure Carbon will make sense for most activities.

spockz 26 minutes ago | parent

On pro here and I can do about 2 design tasks a week before I hit usage limits with Argon. The usage limit with carbon is probably gone just loading the context.

rpdillon 4 minutes ago | parent

Yep, I'm on Pro as well, and Argon been hugely useful, but I get about 10 prompts with it a week. And that means that I have to use 3.8 flash for most of what I'm doing, which is obviously not a great experience for any kind of long horizon tasks.

staticman2 32 minutes ago | parent

I wonder why my consumer Gemini app has Argon and 3.8 flash with a pro plan but so many people here don't have that.

Is the issue that consumers get it sooner or is the roll out random or locked to some other factor?

antonvs 29 minutes ago | parent

In one case I had to upgrade my Antigravity GUI to see new models, I guess because of an API change.

At the same time, the CLI saw the new models without any change. Possibly that was just because my CLI install was newer than the GUI one. (Edit: oh, it's because my CLI autoupdates. Autoupdates for the GUI on Linux in an AppImage is... messy.)

Edit: But in this case:

> Gemini 4 Carbon is available via the API in Google AI Studio and Gemini for business for all paying developers and enterprises

I.e. Seems to be API only right now.

p_l 5 minutes ago | parent

I found out when I opened Gemini app on phone and it showed Carbon Medium as default

mattlondon 7 minutes ago | parent

I have Carbon in my consumer Gemini too. I have a Google drive storage upgrade that I pay for that I assume is bundled with it - it's the only thing I can think of as I've certainly not gone out of my way to do anything special to get access (and so far, it is free for me to access it this way)

Murrawhip 31 minutes ago | parent

My Google Workspace Gemini (with "AI Expanded Access") has 3.6 Flash, 3.8 Thinking, 4 Carbon.

My personal "AI Pro" Gemini has 3.5 Flash-Lite, 3.8 Flash, 3.1 Pro, 4 Argon.

Pretty inconsistent.

htrp 5 minutes ago | parent

This is the GoogleWay

jack_pp 27 minutes ago | parent

considering how little you can use argon with pro, i guess carbon will be the same so why do you care?

theanonymousone 27 minutes ago | parent

Same. On PLUS subscription. One of those situations where you really want a human to talk to..

irthomasthomas 18 minutes ago | parent

They just took 3.1 pro away from me while I was asking about Cami Clark and Epstein (for due-dilligince), lol. Now I have access to 3.6 Flash and 3.5 flash-light. So I canceled my sub. Shame. I used to love using antigravity when the allowance was good.

jgbuddy 35 minutes ago | parent

Still don't see it!

spider-mario 34 minutes ago | parent

> Using Google Antigravity’s /swarm feature, Carbon built an open-world 3D game where you explore Google’s Mountain View campus as a pelican riding a GBike

pelicanmaxxing is here.

5555watch 33 minutes ago | parent

Available through the API.

To add, it's actually surprisingly good. I have this unfinished paper draft that I keep feeding to various top AI's to see what it picks up on and what suggests to edit, and while Astra/Fable/Opus/Argon so far has been mediocre, Carbon's answer surprised me with some interesting points all the other AI's missed.

It's an anecdote, sample of one, but it got my attention.

lilbigdoot 9 minutes ago | parent

I haven't tried Carbon yet, but Argon has been my favorite for asking questions or doing research on something I'm working on.

doctoboggan 33 minutes ago | parent

That was faster than the previous announcement -> release cycles, right?

What's the recommended coding harness I should be using to test it out? (Recommended by folks here, not by Google...)

drivebyhooting 19 minutes ago | parent

Surely it should be antigravity?

bscphil 11 minutes ago | parent

No, just like Argon it was released 14 days after the announcement.

Argon was announced 30 September, publicly available 13 October. Carbon announced 28 October, publicly available 10 November.

lisenKaci 28 minutes ago | parent

This has been available in AI studio via api for a while now.

bscphil 27 minutes ago | parent

Looks like it's the same price as Argon on openrouter, which is good to see. Probably was announced already somewhere that I missed.

It's interesting that Opencode Go got Argon, I'm hoping they'll get Carbon as well. They claim that Argon is ZDR on their platform. That's surprising to me because openrouter doesn't have ZDR endpoints for Google's models any more, due to a change in policy.

BeetleB 22 minutes ago | parent

I wish they would either reduce the price of Argon, or provide a "weaker" model at a decent price.

At my work, Argon is deemed to be too expensive, and gemini-3.8 flash is just not good enough.

bscphil 14 minutes ago | parent

Deepseek is good enough for me that I use it for everything cost sensitive. I tend to switch to Google's models for world knowledge, planning, and complicated bugs that Deepseek gets stuck on. Argon is also a great writer in my experience, hopefully Carbon is the same. Seems like RL for code generation ruins most model's communication abilities. V4.1 Flash 1017 is a significant step back from the previous Deepseek model in that respect, despite being a noticeably better coder.

cyrusmg 26 minutes ago | parent

With Plus subscription this is in the list of available models, but says: "Unavailable - Gemini 4 Carbon is currently available to Ultra plan subscribers."

tuskie 26 minutes ago | parent

Is this an intentional naming clash with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_(programming_language)?

dude250711 10 minutes ago | parent

Maybe a stark reminder about growing data centre carbon emissions?

drivebyhooting 20 minutes ago | parent

What’s the difference between /boost, /teamwork, and now /swarm?

Anecdotally with Argon it would cut corners when attempting to one shot complicated prompts. Adversarial review would find hardcoded hacks and even bugs in physics code.

/teamwork did help with that but made it take EVEN LONGER

I’m hoping Carbon (with /swarm?) is going to help me with my physics and engineering. I don’t like having to cross check with Claude or Sol just to trust the results.

ftchd 19 minutes ago | parent

I needed something to switch the account where the usage is taken from, not the configuration.

I made something simple & transparent named Switcheroo: https://github.com/FTCHD/switcheroo

Works with other AI CLIs like Gemini, and other various CLIs like Vercel (if you're managing multiple accounts like me), Netlify, Github etc

iamgopal 9 minutes ago | parent

Does it work with antigravity?

Latitude7973 17 minutes ago | parent

It uses more tokens than Argon? I already get very little out of my Pro subscription (using Antigravity) with Argon.

catigula 17 minutes ago | parent

Gemini vis-a-vis Claude and GPT seems to have substantial unsolved hallucination problems. Hope it’s solved or it can’t be used for agentic coding.

boodleboodle 14 minutes ago | parent

Just want to say I find Carbon waaay better than Argon. I keep noticing google model sumbissions on hackernews getting targetted by systematically negative comments.

FacelessJim 11 minutes ago | parent

Maybe they had insider knowledge that anthropic was about to release fable 5.2? The timing is a bit too convenient.

hmokiguess 7 minutes ago | parent

> Using Google Antigravity’s /swarm feature, Carbon built an open-world 3D game where you explore Google’s Mountain View campus as a pelican riding a GBike — coordinating subagents to model 3D assets in Blender from Omni and Nano Banana references, build the browser game in Three.js with WebGL shaders, and pair procedural Web Audio sound effects with Lyria music.[1]

Amazing, can we now close this pelican benchmark and move on to different things?

bluecalm 6 minutes ago | parent

Google makes it really hard to try their models. Guys, let me try it on pro or whatever sub. If I like it I will pay you more. I am already paying Anthropic 600 bucks a month and will pay more the moment they offer higher tier sub (I have 3x Ultra now) but I downgraded my Google sub because it's just so hard to try anything from them and it takes forever from the announcement to land in the app.

TomGarden 5 minutes ago | parent

Carbon and Argon are such similar names this is the first time I've registered they are different models.

Google branding strikes again