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.
This model is not for you or me. This model is for Google AI engineers to put on their perf review at the end of the year. How you find or not find it, it doesn't matter. It goes into the "designed and developed Gemini 4 Carbon Ultra Pro" paragraph and people get a promotion, get to keep their jobs and hope to not get replaced by Gemini 4 Carbon next year.
That seems like an overly negative caricature of Google’s corporate culture, and unlikely to be the case here, given the stakes and enormous investments in AI.
It’s more likely what the grandparent was saying, I’m reminded of Steve Yegge’s rant from 15 years ago and it seems like not a lot has changed.
https://gist.github.com/chitchcock/1281611
The results are indistinguishable. Massive organisations tend towards self aggrandivizing work.
At some point, the metrics for delivering to customers runs counter to what the bureaucracy was building itself to actually deliver: jobs.
"overly"? surely not... maybe in the sense that it isn't "underly", but there are much more uncharitable caricatures of Google's corporate culture that I would freely admit than that.
I wish this was a joke. Turns out, Google turned into a joke. I was really rooting for them; They had everything in place to be the top dog. From people to research to hardware to internet.zip (and video.zip and emails.zip and newsgroups.zip and code.zip and android.zip etc..). I don't want to sound negative and what they built is probably great in its own right, but what was expected of them and what they have delivered so far, I can definitely say that they blew it hard. They did manage to turn gemini into search 2.0 on google.com and it does work.. but, come on. Where's the google of yesterday? Seems they put a ton of weight that's not on the level of people that were there before and I don't want to offend anyone there, but it sure looks like that.
The same was true 15 years ago when the cloud started hyping up and Google missed that in similar ways as well, so I’m not sure whether the “Google of yesterday” is who you think it is.
This is the Google of yesterday, they didn’t change.
Fair point
A good % of the Google of yesterday is now in working in frontier labs, crushing it.
The only good products Google has ever built in-house are search and GMail. Everything else is acquisition or crappy product.
So we should ask “why would it be different this time.”
IMO google maps and google earth were revolutionary when they came out. And maps stayed well ahead of competition for many many years.
I'm one of those few that liked Google Wave!
There are ones of you!
Maps was originally an acquisition.
Both were acquisitions.
Youtube, hate it or not, is really good. The amount of data they have to handle everyday is on different level.
For sure. It was an acquisition, though.
Isn't Waymo the state of the art?
They’re still the same price as an uber and there’s no way to actually order one, it’s all random. I don’t understand why… like I actively would prefer them. If they were available so instead I find myself reaching for the cybercabs instead at half the price.
Uh, use the Waymo app?
Chrome was pretty great as well, it was desperately needed.
Google Chrome didn't start from scratch. Blink came from WebKit which came from KDE's KHTML. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(browser_engine) , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KHTML
Entirely irrelevant - Chrome really stepped up both security and speed over WebKit at that time.
The comment you replied to was: "The only good products Google has ever built in-house are [...]"
I don't have enough information to judge how much of Chrome was original work and how much was pre-existing work. Though I guess by now, after nearly 20 years, Chrome's codebase looks absolutely nothing like KHTML.
App Engine was good for its time, and I don't think that was an acquisition. Similarly, Cloud Storage and Google Cloud in general are pretty good products.
I started using AWS when EC2 and S3 first came out, but was forced to switch to Gcloud by the most recent company I joined. I was pleasantly surprised. In many ways it's more techie-focused than AWS, which is more enterprise-focused. And their managed Kubernetes is second to none.
> I was really rooting for them
may I ask why?
Model selector at the top drops down and shows
* 3.5 Flash-Lite
* 3.8 Flash
* 3.1 Pro
* 4 Argon - New
And honestly, the versions are hurting their case. I ask myself “how is the oldest model, the Pro model?”
This kind of bungled naming and versioning is the kind of thing I expect from Microsoft.
Didn't for me (antigravity, pro sub). I got it working with the API, but to my dismay I learned that counts as enterprise and so many features are disabled, such as auto mode.
It's supposed to be from 'smallest' to 'biggest' not release date.
The problem is when they stop releasing big models for so long that their small models overtake large ones.
User wise, the average person will see pro and expect it to be better. Where as companies like OpenAI have tended to release across small/mid/large such that the disparity hasn’t been large in terms of a smaller model outperforming their latest mid/large model.
Not sure how much it matters for the average user though.
For myself and most others that actively use LLMs, I’m aware of the model names and differences, and on the off chance I don’t, I can do a quick search to find out.
On the other hand, my dad (“average user”) probably doesn’t care whether to use Argon or Pro, or Flash for that matter. They are all good enough for his use case anyway.
I suppose the “Auto” option is what AI companies expect the average user to use.
Pro is better, except for agentic coding work
Agentic coding work or just agentic work?
You would hope they wouldn't have old big models that are worse than new small models available in the interface like that.
This is the least bad thing about using antigravity. It’s friction and jank all the way down.
Microsoft has figured this out: 1. No models at all. 2. Everything is copilot.
“What?” You ask?
Yes.
MSFT is releasing models. See the MAI suite: https://microsoft.ai/models/
Technically not true any more (for some versions of copilot chat, at least) -- my workplace's version has a "GPT 5.6 Sol" selector with "Answer faster" or "Think Deeper". ("Think deeper" appears to represent the lowest reasoning effort).
But you have to select it each time; otherwise "Auto" sends you to a lobomised model that is probably Phi-4 :(
One of the unexpectedly useful aspects of Simon Willison's pelican benchmark is that you can estimate what model you're using via the pelican it generates:
"GPT 5.6 Sol": appears genuine, albeit low reasoning. -> handed off agentically: appears to be using Luna for agentic tasks.
"Auto": very low quality, does not appear to be an OAI model.
Yes, but last time I asked copilot to provide an alt text for an image depicting a experimental procedure using rodents, it suggested "A rat being attacked by another group of rats".
That’s why no one uses it and it sucks.
It is part of Office 365 ( or whatever they are calling it now ) subscription and apart from coding, it is literally forced into everyone's throat in Fortune 500 for day to day task.
Also limits are horrendous on all plans I might as well instead use Fable that would cost me less
I only use Pro for Google as their models were so far behind, but I tried to give Argon a go, and notably it is only available in the chat interface. One brief conversation, with three exchanges, and my quota was exhausted and it restricted me to Flash-lite for the rest of the day. Rather comical stuff.
And it prompts me to upgrade to Ultra for "5x more usage". In contrast I use my Claude Max plan endlessly, on enormous problems, and my 5x max plan sees me almost never hitting double digits on my quota using Opus 5.5. It doesn't compel me to sign up for Google's higher level plans.
i hear this but i can't believe it. I'm writing multiple moderate apps. rebuilding entire distributions. not coming anywhere near hitting the limit. Pro plan (on a discount too). What am I doing wrong (right?)?
Im using pro on a discount. I got argon a few days after the release but the usage limits are worthless. Asking it for a simple review of a blog post blows through 50% of the usage limit. And in the limited experimenting I have been able to do because of that it also isn’t smarter than 3.8 flash.
Could it be skills / customizations? There are tools that will help you understand where your tokens are getting burned.
Making sure you are scoping your context, being specific also helps.
And I do 90% of my work on 3.8 - flash - low. C, go , JS, bash , powershell generated content. Near perfect quality.
I hear lots of people say the budgets are low – I’m absolutely hammering it sometimes indiscriminately (shell into this instance, rebuild the entire vm image).
so I’m not sure what the gap is.
Yeah, I have 85 minutes of "High" thinking time on my current hardware project and still have 25% quota left. $20 pro plan.
How are you coding on the Pro plan without antigravity? Copy/paste?
I'm on a Pro plan and Argon is in Antigravity for me now for some reason. It wasn't available at launch so I'm not sure when they backtracked.
I'm on the Pro as well, haven't checked if argon became available on antigravity, will tomorrow, thanks!
I noticed the usage on chat is absymal, but it could very well be that their own harness does a good job in caching and you can squeeze good usage out of it due to this.
I see 4 / Argon on Antigravity
> how is the oldest model, the Pro model?
Because apparently their Pro models had issues.
Wouldn't you rather a company be honest about that than hiding it from you?
The other end of the scale is Microsoft, where everything is Copilot.
Claude and OpenAI were doing it. What good are business lemmings if they don't yeet themselves off a cliff?
I remember a year ago and a bit ago trying to get an api key for some Gemini ~3 model. I probably spent an hour trying to find how to get a key in AI Studio. Finally figure it out and got a key.
I needed batch mode. Oh but the key from service X doesn't support batch mode, you need to go service Y and btw there is no UI for that so you need to use an SDK or API (cant even remember anymore). Spend an hour figuring that out, then it turns out I can't use batch mode because I don't have permissions. Have boss spend an hour granting me permissions. Then service is unavailable every n requests for 5 minutes, so I have fuck with exponential back offs.
Glad to see they moved that experience to their consumer offerings lol.
Yeah, their native API reliability is absolutely horrible. Constant request failures. I've always had to go through Vertex or OpenRouter for any sort of heavy load.
It's at least not worse than Microsoft. Go and start a chat with Copilot. Which one? I don't know, they are all the same. Or maybe they are all different? All I know that if you start a chat in one interface, there is close to a 0% chance (but not quite) that you will find the same chat in another interface.
There's no 3.8 Pro. However, there's a 3.8 Flash that's only available with Pro or Ultra subscription.
Brilliant!!
I had Claude write me a script to probe all the GCP Vertex models. I can say with confidence that I know how to call Argon, because Claude told me how, I did it, saw it was modestly better than Flash for my use case and I decided it wasn't worth the money right now, for this use case.
I'm fairly confident I can't call Carbon, and I am okay with that.
I just spent 10m trying to use this.
It is the most awful product experience I’ve had this year. How could they fuck it up this badly?
> I just spent 10m trying to use this
wow pricing has gone way up
Is it dollars per million tokens, or tokens per million dollars?
Maybe ChatGPT could figure it out?
Unironically it's easier through third parties. Cursor has had Argon available, but in our enterprise we cannot get argon from the gemini subscription because they have some weird license split going on.
Yeah I was using Argon in Cursor on launch day and it's become my daily driver for anything requiring moderate smarts or lots of prose.
Not surprising that Cursor is better at charging money for something that isn't an ad.
I too could not figure it out. Also a shame the Vertex API format is sorta different to OpenAI's, which everyone but Anthropic uses. The sanest way to use Google AI models is via OpenRouter tbh.
Guys, please don't interrupt them in this endeavour.
Gemini on my phone has a "4 Argon' option. I have the plan through Google One.
Same here. When I use the Gemini app for iOS, it says that I’m on “Ultra” in the left sidebar near the bottom. It doesn’t say that when I’m using Gemini on the web.
Why is it so hard for a decent PM, Designer, and Eng team to build out a better version of Antigravtity with an equivalent web interface for general chat? I don't get it.
Your workspace admin need to get AI Expanded Access plan.
All I see is 3.1 pro and 3.6 flash, I just canceled the sub lol - those seem like half a year old and I'm too lazy to check - my workplace gives me access to all models in a harness anyways
The Android app (and OS while we're at it) is such a horrible mess compared to Claude, just pure horror coming from Google, i'd be ashamed...
I’m with you on this. I tried to get Argon access for our org and failed. gave up. moved on. Still just 3.8 in the dropdown for us.. Thinking its just in so Ai studio app or something and not in gemini app?
the charitable explanation is that they derive the most important revenue in this area from enterprise. And enterprises are not allergic to horrible product experiences and upsells.
The more likely explanation (even if the above is technically true) is that Google is not good at cohesive product experiences.
I thought Gemini 4 Argon is still not publicly released.
It's in Antigravity plans and on Openrouter.
Oh, true, I forgot.
That's what happens when you announce the model 1 month before it is available...
it is for personal accounts, but for corporate accounts your IT needs to enable it
Not disagreeing with the premise - I've fought with this in the past - but I'm using Antigravity CLI and Antigravity desktop (GUI), and both automatically started defaulting to Argon 4 as their model a while back.
I have an AI Pro account - which I decided was a no-brainer because of the 5TB of Gmail / GDrive / GPhotos space it gives - and this all just comes along with that.
One thing to check, though, is that the client is running the latest version. At one point my Antigravity GUI, which had been working fine, started listing only Claude and GPT-OSS models. It turned out to be because the GUI needed to be updated. I guess the Google API endpoint had changed behavior without any backward compatibility.
So yeah, they're hilariously bad at rollouts, but it's not that difficult if you're technically inclined or ask an LLM.
I tend to wait until it shows up in Google AI Studio. That is there web interface at least, no idea for mobile.
I think it's intentional for balancing a demand profile rather than spiking their massive user base onto a new model all at once
I don't even read Google's release notes anymore. What's the point? The models are never available.
Now, I just go straight to the Hacker News comments. I've given up on trying to figure out how to navigate Google's labyrinth.
Their release notes have become like breakthroughs in graphene. I'll believe it when I see it.
Their go-to-market execution is just so broken.
At the beginning of this whole AI shift, when Google would announce a new model, I would try to get access, even paying for a subscription.
Then I realized it's just not possible.
Google onboarding is the new Gordian knot.
For Google, I think the announcement is the success criteria. And onboarding is somebody else's problem. And the problem is... that somebody doesn't work at Google, or are entirely disempowered.
If, someday, Hacker News comments indicate that a majority of individuals have figured out how to access these newly announced models consistently, I might take my precious personal time to navigate the labyrinth once more.
> Its sad watching them try to keep up
"try to keep up" ?
Benchmarks are just benchmarks and they could have been carefully selected but it's not "trying to keep up": they're ahead of Fable 5.1 and GTP 6 Astra in 15 of the 17 benchmarks. And in many cases by a huge margin.
Instead of talking about that, let's talk about how difficult it is to pick the model or how crazy Google's product naming methodology is.
Not saying they're not concerns: but let's not downplay what the model is achieving by saying they're "trying to pick up" because switching model ain't as easy as with the competition.
I mean: I don't use a model based on how easy it is to switch to another model. That's not what I'm looking for.