alt Hacker NewsAnnounced the model two weeks ago to a ton of hype, model was unavailable for anyone to try. On twitter, Google folks went on a great run taking shots at Muse ("Muse who?"). The hype died down bc nobody could touch the models and meta/muse came out with a similarly capable model in the meanwhile.
At the same time, OpenAI had a disastrous dev day that led a lot of users to jump ship to Claude.
Couple weeks later, Gemini-4-argon is still unavailable on anything less than the ultra tier, which means there's no natural funnel to get ppl to pay for the more expensive ultra plan other than "trust us the model is good".
If Google had argon broadly available earlier this month they would have picked up a ton of new users.
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All the power users are always jumping around by now and many hold the smallest subscription with all the models or at least two.
Narrating this as if it’s the game of thrones is a fun exercise, but it’s just becoming commonplace now that models jump ahead of each other on a weekly to Monthly basis.
Just for the record, I'm a Spanish user with Google AI pro (€20 per month or so) and my app has Argon now. (Yay!)
Why did people jump to Claude? I redirected company resources to OpenAI Pro 500 accounts and away from Anthropic for most use.
We’re all running on Astra medium the whole week and loving it.
I’m curious what I missed.
Gemini 4 is announced be available to Pro users in the Gemini app.
I mean, I heard rumors too that it would be ultra only, but that doesn't seem to be the case, unless you are specifically talking about antigravity?
Realistically, market adoption isn't going to be the result of terminally online people (like me, I confess) following things way too closely on social.
> At the same time, OpenAI had a disastrous dev day that led a lot of users to jump ship to Claude.
Can you elaborate on this?
"model was unavailable for anyone to try"
Oh yeah. Completely forgot about that. Big headlines and big claims, but no one could actually use it and report on it.
Does seem like they don't quite grasp how the hype train operates. Or maybe they don't care as much.
As someone internal at Google I don't understand why there's so much criticism of Google models... but right now I'm using the next model beyond Argon, and Flash 3.8. In my personal Gemini app I only have access to 3.5.
Models move so fast now and Google is very cautious about releasing them.