alt Hacker News Argon will launch at an introductory price [1] of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, with cached input tokens priced at 95% off input token price.
[1] After the introductory period expires, the price of $4 per 1M input tokens and $20 per 1M output tokens will apply.
So, they are basically offering opus 5.5 pricing. On AA, it scores around Sol 6.1 level (53) with avg cost per task $1.99 (https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/gemini-4-argon#cost-tab...) which is higher than Astra high ($1.73), Opus 5.5 high ($1.82), Muse Max ($1.60) and way higher than sol 6.1 Max ($0.72).
And this pricing is their 'discount pricing'. Add that to AI studio and Vertex's famously terrible caching, it is hard to see this as competitive. Google somehow is getting terrible advice on pricing (see also: the flash pricing fiasco)
But good to see more competition. I would happily take a 4 horse race (+google, +meta) than 2 horse race for US labs.
Replies
Benchmarks are only part of the story, most workloads don't match what you see on these.
For example sonnet is supposedly the same price as opus from medium and up, I tested it on a real world task at my day job and sonnet was a good 30-50% cheaper
Terrible take, it’s tied with Astra Max yet you decided to round it down for no good reason.
Then you try to pin discount pricing when everyone has some discount going on, and knows they will release some new model before it ends anyway.
And if you’d have used Muse Max at all you’d know it’s not been really in the same league as the rest. Then again Astra and Sol are both not really competing with Opus now with 5.5 either.
It’s a solid release on paper and until anyone uses it I find anyone trying to proclaim a loser completely unreliable.
If they’re smart they pull a DeepSeek and teach flash to beat this entirely within a month or two, I wouldn’t bet against it.