Gemini 4 Carbon

I am on a paid plan for Google's AI offering, and I did just about ten prompts to Argon before I hit my 5 hour limit. I'm not holding my breath this will be a model that is practical to use now either.

Now we know why AA updated their benchmarking. Bet they weren’t #1 before the change…

They managed to piss off all classes of their customers with their latest Argon release. They removed old flash models and gemini pro without actually giving Argon to everybody. Then they released the model to only paying customers to the exclusion of free plans or promotional deals like that comes with their Pixel phones. They staggered the release of Argon and didn't give it to Pro and Ultra users at the same time. Pro users when they got it received an extra usage pool for it (didn't help - they can't do anything with their token quota) while Ultra users have a single pool shared with Gemini Flash. I am not even sure if Antigravity got it yet. Literally nobody is happy about the release and they don't seem to care at all.

I tried previous Google models before and they were ok but I prefer to stick to Claude or Astra these days.

Maybe I am just paranoid but at least if OAI or Anthropic ban my account I am not at the risk of losing access to my email address too.

You never know with Google and that is a problem.

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.

Argon Carbon Xxmas Jaxxon Flaxxon Waxxon

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 are overall ahead of Astra.

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.

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.

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/)

will this again will be one of those mediocre two-prompt models like Nitrogen, or whatever it was called?

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.

i dont know how to contribute to this platform.

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.

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

Well, they won the race on confusing the shit out of us with model names.

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.

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.

> Coming soon

Come on googs!

benchmaxxed shit

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.

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.

> 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...

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