Gemini 4 Argon

I haven't tried it for coding yet, but I ran a couple of my recent curiosity driven queries from Claude (mostly used Fable and Opus 5.5) through it.

This is a clear step change, I'm genuinely amazed.

Its answers are to-the-point, logically structured, clearly written. Like a really well made mini essay on your question.

It also really likes to build little simulations / models that you can tweak the parameters on. Amazing to explore how different assumptions affect economic scenarios, for example.

It's also great at picking (sourced) illustrations.

I'll be using this for everything that isn't coding from now on.

I'm using this model via API. I am most excited about its ability to write the english language (or any language). My least favorite trend on twitter has been people posting 2D illustrations/3D renders as a proxy for model capability. Well-written prose is far less likely to go viral but far outstrips the importance rendering a fantasy world in one shot.

I've been trying it out via the API and the model has been a delight so far. Clear in the head, not RL-fried, distinct writing style, and big model smell. That said, the em-dash is back w/ this model.

That said, I would be so frustrated with Sundar Pichai if I was on the Google team. The botched rollout of this model seems to be entirely a matter of capacity, and Pichai has been more than happy to give it to anybody but his own team.

I just created a Google account, which was a hassle. I tried to find an app and found AI Studio, but I’m not sure what that is. Then I found Antigravity, which apparently is Google’s alternative to Codex, and I installed it. Then I tried to buy the small Gemini AI Ultra package, but it didn’t let me pay. It accepted neither my credit card nor my PayPal account. It’s crazy how bad the Google experience is nowadays. You don’t know what to use or where to find it, and the security measures seem totally overkill. Am I really the only one having these experiences? Is Google aware of that?

> The model launches today at an introductory price of $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens (with cached input tokens at 95% off).

Couldn't you just say what the price will be after the introductory period and when it'll take effect? Do they have some SKILL.md for these blog posts that requires the most important information to always be buried ten levels deep and hidden behind a login page?

Classic Google: Clicks the "Try in Gemini" button from the Gemini 4 page, gets a page that defaults to Gemini 3.6, with no option to try Gemini 4 without upgrading.

If they don't want to make it available even for small tests for free, that's fine, but then don't put a button suggesting I can try it without qualifying it...

EDIT: It's actually worse: The page then shows "Look what you can do with Gemini 4" and a "Let's go" button that leads to a bunch of links to examples, all with enticing pictures. Except if I click on them I get a box stat strongly suggests it'll run with Gemini 4, except the dropdown shows "Flash" and if you click on it, it shows as Gemini 3.6 again, and if you run it, the results unsurprisingly end up looking nothing like their pictures.

I don't know if that page was built by humans or AI, but clearly nobody tested it properly.

Gemini 4 Argon is a new leader in Pareto-frontier. Looks like, Google is back in the race.

https://arena.ai/leaderboard/agent/chat/pareto

For almost same intelligence (+15.56%, +15.18%), drastic difference in cost/task ($3.51 vs $0.41)

People should appreciate Google more for how all of their models have:

- Natively multi-modality

- Enormous context windows

- Reliably cheap prices

It's like they don't release a model until it passes the above checklist.

Most providers have some mixture of these three occasionally, but with Google, every model is consistent. This kind of consistency is really nice to have.

Image->html test for Argon. I'd put it at B tier, just under gpt 6.1 sol. It isn't A tier like Opus 5.5 or Astra.

Argon build: https://html.non.io/lcars-argon/

GPT 6.1 sol: https://html.non.io/lcars-gpt-6.1-sol/

Opus 5.5 (currently SOTA for this): https://html.non.io/lcars-opus-5.5/

Original designs: https://diffui.ai/app/canvas/5093e689-1e74-4f26-b632-2a4500f...

Unsurprisingly, the pelicans are excellent. Google are the only lab who have publicly shared that they have specifically trained for SVG output - https://twitter.com/sunjiao123sun_/status/202455551655137292... - and they've had great pelican results in the past too (which they have shown off themselves - https://twitter.com/JeffDean/status/2024525132266688757).

Here's low, medium, high. Even low is better than pelicans from any other lab: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

low cost 10.185 cents, medium was 11.098 cents, high was 17.166 cents.

The costs are similar because it used more output tokens than reasoning tokens for all three pelicans, even for high.

> built to solve your hardest problems

Like a working scroll on a webpage.

God damn this is impossible to use of safari mobile.

Gemini isn't perfect but I find it a lot less annoying than other model families (personal preference or stockholm syndrome). Interested to read the reviews.

Is it actually available?

It's a great model. I have had it trying to decrypt the Voynich manuscript for the past couple of days without being biased by other research/other people's attempts. If anyone is interested: https://github.com/d2kx/voynich-research

Of all models I like to write with Gemini the most. The language appears much more natural and elegant than what even Opus 5.5 or Astra do. Also, they give 5TB of cloud storage and discounts, it’s a steal for what you get.

The code is bad though.

Good God, man. Google has the worst frontier lab rollout of them all. And they're delivering products that are behind the curve constantly.

Now, I happen to believe that's an excellent strategy. I bet they actually resolve more LLM requests than any other company at this point. The lay person still uses Google exclusively.

Adding my five cents: initial usage through OpenRouter has been great. Very fun model to spar with, clever, intelligent. On par with Opus 5.5 but without the Claudism's and more of a Sol type of conversation. Though speaking of Sol, I've been very dissapointed with Sol 6.1 to the extent that I feel OpenAI has neutered it compared to a few months ago. Especially when giving it goals it will happily run in dumb circles just burning tokens without any real work.

Google continues to be the best in German language and Gemini 4 is a significant jump in our benchmarks

https://dach.peerbench.ai/compare?models=google%2Fgemini-4-a...

Put it through my standard benchmark, a six step explainer... yes, in 3D.

Very fast.

Makes mistakes. Corrects the mistakes quickly with direction.

Google Argon 4: https://share.gemini.google/T9r6tr2dDaTE

I didn't have time to make it into a full blog post yet. Here is a previous one.

https://generative-ai.review/2026/07/kimi-k3-rush-test-vs-cl...

I am impressed by how fast it is. Haven't run all my evals but it's surprisngly quick for creating files

To everyone saying not available yet: it looks from the page like Pro and Ultra subscribers have it today and given the play links, it'll probably show up in the API in a few hours.

Gemini 4 Argon

As of my knowledge cutoff, three of the top state-of-the-art large language models are Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro, OpenAI's o3 (and GPT-4.5), and Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet.

"Argon autonomously turns raw video to a physics-accurate simulation, estimating depth and physical boundaries, and writing the exact simulation code required to replicate those real-world environments."

This is crazy if it can work accurately.

A model that didn‘t break out of its sandbox and hacked other websites cannot be good.

I have the Free AI Pro plan from when I purchased my Pixel 11 Pro. I still don't have Argon in AGY nor web nor Gemini app. I have a free product and still feel cheated.

When you are on "gemini.google.com" there is a little lock icon next to Gemini 3 and Gemini 4. When you click it you get the prompt to subscribe (pay). Once you have successfully done so, the Gemini 4 option disappears!

Pretty misleading.

I ran it through my own coding eval today using pi/OpenRouter (11 small bug fixes from my own projects). It solved 10 of 11. Compared to Sonnet 5.5 and GPT-6.1 Sol, a median run cost me $0.52 vs $0.18 for Sonnet and $0.09 for Sol, and took ~4 minutes vs 32 seconds and ~1.5 minutes.

It thinks a ton, ~24k output tokens a run vs ~3k for Sonnet. It missed a solution by thinking its way into a 10 min timeoout.

Something to look out for - if you're using pi, it doesn't have Argon in its catalog yet and reports cost at Kimi's rates, about a third of what OpenRouter actually bills.

I seriously doubt their ability to double API prices on Dec 1. Token prices are in a clear downward trend and Google should maximize revenue by competing for volume. Currently OpenAI is the only US frontier lab trying to seriously compete with open-weight models that you can run yourself for an order of magnitude lower than what frontier labs want to charge

I'm open to Google winning me over again, but there isn't enough hype in the world to do it. They will need to earn it after these disappointing 6 months.

It's nice to have it available for more complex tasks, but I'll stick with 3.8 Flash thanks to its high output speed. I really like it for fast iteration and prototyping.

Meanwhile, here's Gemini in practice:

Me: Gemini, navigate to nearest McDonalds.

Gemini: [Lists 10 McDonalds locations wnd asks which I want.]

Me: What were the priginal instructions just now?

Gemini: [Recites imperatives about tone and content from its memory system.]

Me: No. I told you to navigate to the NEAREST McDonalds. There's only one NEAREST McDonalds. Do that one.

Gemini: My mistake, navigating to the nearest McDonalds. [Opens Maps, navigating to a McDonalds across town.]

I'm a bit confused, all the announcements say that this is availabe to Ultra and Pro subscribers, but in antigravity, it's grayed out and says it's only available to Ultra.

https://shot.3e.org/ss-20261013_160043.jpg google's roll-out procedures on point as usual

Only available in the $100 plan, and it's worse than Opus 5.5? Why would you ever buy this?

I'm pro and I see that I need to be Ultra to use Argon :/

argon seems to be really good at spatial reasoning, it's catching really minute details which other models like astra and opus seem to miss.

build this scene space station docking scene https://x.com/_satyam_ai/status/2110097633922662752?s=20

Adversarial programming language test for Argon. Surprisingly its safety guardrail gets triggered a lot just like for Fable 5.1.

    Claude Opus 5.5   58.7%
    Gemini 4 Argon    47.1%
    Claude Fable 5.1  46.7%

Benchmarks: https://bench.killswitch-lang.org/

Language info: https://killswitch-lang.org/

I can’t try it because it’s not available on the free tier and no way in hell I’m tying a credit card to google, I’ll wait for argon-lite.

Announced two weeks ago and they went on a victory lap and they're already behind by the time they launched. Strange company, Google.

Google's models are by far the best for readable text but also for nuanced understanding of the input.

Even after using the free model in Google search talking to Anthropic or OpenAI models feels like talking to an ox.

Maybe they could ask Gemini to fix their awful website to not crash on my phone!

I would love to try it out, and the Gemini models had previously been some of the ones I'd liked best in an overall sense, but unfortunately their updated inference endpoint is no longer ZDR on OpenRouter (change takes effect on the 18th). I think this is one of the more unfortunate turns in AI development in 2026, as it seemed like labs offering it was becoming the norm last year, and Google had previously done so consistently.

Looks at watch.

OpenAI release any time now

Pretty insane that this isn't available for Pro subscribers on Antigravity, like not even a taste. Antigravity comes with a sample of Opus 5.5 too!

Excited to finally see this out. When new big models come out I like to make them audit any other code I generated to see how things are.

Only available on Ultra, so I thought maybe I'll try it for one month to see if it's good. Well, I have Google One and for some reason this means I cannot sign up for AI Ultra? This is just one of the worst product rollouts I've ever seen

As I approach a transitional period in my career, I'm reflecting on the managerial effort of places like google. How on earth do they keep an engineering org on the 'right track'? I work on products that are not as complex: fewer moving parts, fewer egos, no where near as novel. It feels like nobody does anything and nobody has any expertise

is it just 'Hire the right people'?

Right now there are two top posts one about GLM-Legal and one about Argon. Both score about the same in the Harvey Lab test, but the prices are $0.15 versus $10.55, the $0.15 is Vals AI's estimate using the base model since GLM-Legal has not published prices.

I made a NHL inspired hockey web game with Opus 5.5, and I let Argon loose on it to try and see if it could improve it, and it found a ton of bugs and improved performance and load times significantly. If anyone wants to play it here:

https://playblueline.pages.dev/

The should ask Claude to make the page scroll faster.

can't use in agy with Pro subscription:

Unavailable · Gemini 4 Argon is currently available to Ultra plan subscribers.

Gemini 3.1 is still SOTA at weird handwriting recognition. If Argon is better it will be amazing

I feel like if Google simplified their privacy/model training policy then their stock would go up.

It feels so complicated and hard to know what we can use vs what hands them our codebases

Digging in the model card, "Gemini 4 is the next generation in the Gemini series, a suite of highly-capable, natively multimodal, reasoning models. Gemini 4 Argon delivers frontier performance..." If they're using noble gases there are 2 obvious lighter naming candidates and 3 larger (or 4 if you count Oganesson). I'm not seeing them claiming Argon is the top/biggest/bestest model among the Gemini 4 series, just that it has frontier performance.

Edit: noble gases not noble taxes, though the latter would be a funnier naming scheme.

It shows a good improvement on my COCO object detection benchmark: 0.504 mAP zero-shot.

Gemini 3 Flash was around 0.403, 2.5 Pro was around 0.34.

> Across Google and our early access partners, Argon is quickly becoming the preferred model for engineers tackling long-horizon software engineering.

"Across Google", wonder how much that is because of an effort by Google to curb usage of Anthropic models. MSFT and Meta similarly are pushing for in-house models. It doesn't mean the models are better when you push your engineers to dogfood and restrict access to other LLMs.

(Not that I know for sure this is the case, it's more of a hypothesis).

I gave the model my usual question of "I got a raise from X to Y, please explain what is the impact on my net salary". Answer was detailed and nailed all payroll edge cases, only to miserably fail in basic math at the end. It tried to calculate 430 minus 60 and got 410.

I hope all the people very concerned about AI safety are cheering this one. The best guard against one AI swarm taking over is having multiple adversarial orgs all with similarly advanced AI swarms.

I wonder if any of the AI safety people will begin encouraging AI researchers to swap jobs to work at a failing lab in order to keep them all extremely competitive with one another.

I'm still waiting for a model which I can tell to "take these 3 screenshots and make a product launch video", where it doesn't randomly modify the screenshots or garble/rewrite the text as it moves the screenshots around the video.

Every time I try to generate one it's like a slot machine, where a different part will be messed up after fixing the first.

Wow, the site for the launch is horrible on mobile

not available. classic google.

Do we need to post every single model release on HN?

So who has access to it? The say Ultra and rolling out to Pro, but are those the Google AI plans?

What about the Google One AI plans? Will they get it? That has a Pro AI plan as well.

Any word on how fast it drains usage compared to openai/anthropic sub for the different tiers? I guess too early to tell?

Curious what this means for the anthropic ipo. Between this and meta, seems like there’s zero moat

Is there a benchmark for reverse engineering compiled programs? - Grader compiles a program to binary -> Agent has to reverse it back, and match all bugs and behavior.

It's available for gemini pro users.

It passed the test of using latest crystal-lang concurrent feature (with web search) when gemini 3.8 flash failed (again, with web search enabled). I think it is at least useful for coding, for sometime.

It still thinks Charlie Kirk is alive, though.

Pricing is interesting. At launch Argon is the same price as GPT-6 Sol, half the price of Claude Opus 5.5 and 1/5th the price of Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra.

But on December 1st Argon doubles in price - so it will be the same price as Opus 5.5.

> Our next era of frontier intelligence, built to solve your hardest problems

On safari the page doesn't scroll very well on the first section

All AI pages now include canvas animations. There isn't a single page without one. This is neither good nor bad, just an observation. I think OpenAI has the best animations so far, with Anthropic in second place. This one looks a bit off.

Here's how the 1M token output (long decode) works: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/long-decode

Does Google have a subsidized plan like others? If yes, is it only eligible for use through Antigravity?

not available yet. why to launch something that can never be used even after weeks

It seems the model is a little verbose, using more tokens to complete a task that other similar models as stated more precisely in the linked article about Artificial Analysis's work on this model.

Does this solve the 2 year old bug of recitation hell?

Here I was thinking Google had given up on frontier models...

Doesn't seem like anything special in my tests, not very different from the previous Flash models.

Google has too many options that may confuse users. I don't know if I should use Antigravity or AI studio or Argon for development

Which one is it?

The slides they show in the catering video demo are so bad (in addition to having all the usual signs of AI design), I would genuinely laugh if a supplier sent me this.

Finally, gemini 3.8 has been falling way behind opus and sol in my experience. It's showing up in my antigravity. My work account though still has 3.6, 3.8, 3.1.

Is this supposed to be the new Gemini Pro?

The previous gen pro used to have this weird tick where if you ask it a reasonably open ended question, it would number things in the response and assign each one some weird label starting with 'The...'

e.g.

    X: The Parameters
    Y: The "System"
    Z: The "Ongoing Grind"

The first two prompts I tested in AI Studio does the same, unfortunately.

Another quite unpleasant tick was that if you specify a peculiar term in your prompt as a conversational shortcut, it would keep repeating that throughout the conversation. e.g. "...What is a bitter lesson pilled way to do this?", then you'd see it will quote "bitter lesson pilled" at like 7 places in its response. This one seems to have eased off a little.

Does this mean Googlers will stop using Claude internally?

Not available in my browser/app yet (pro), but I'm confident it'll roll out soon.

That was a long wait.

Can’t even get it on pro tier in antigravity?

What’s the point lol. I’m not subbing to ultra to have it

at this rate we're gonna run out of stupid names for these things

"Hans, we're doing a new point release! What isn't crossed out on the periodic table yet?"

isn't harness as important as model these days?

I've asked Argon to do 3D model for me. It said that it can't do it. I've linked promotional materials and said that it actually can. It agreed and got me a model (not a great one). Man, why is Gemini like this? Every time I fall for the hype I get disappointed.

So like... do I get access?

Not available for me on Pro in the UK.

Just switched, and it seems to be much better. I'm hoping it stops lying. I have Pro max subs for Claude, Codex, Grok, and Google AI... I was forced into using Google by running out of credits elsewhere.

I have found that Gemini often claims it did something, but didn't actually complete the task.

I just had 3.8 Flash do a major refactor -- that never should have needed to be done in the first place -- and switched to Argon 4, and had it review it.

Almost everything had been stubbed out by 3.8, and none of it was properly integrated into the codebase. :facepalm:

Now when another uninteresting frotier model been released Google can finally start doing what we actually waiting for:

Start preparing Gemma 5 release.

Unlike most people it seems, I like all the progress in AI but I really do wish they would reign in the over-the-top marketing. I mean, can we just get this stuff to the point where I can reliably work with it to design a well-architected software project without having to constantly struggle against bloat and nonsense directions no experienced or sane developer would ever take.

fyi: argon is an interesting choice of name, coming from the Greek argos meaning "lazy or living w/out labor".

I use Gemini all day at work via the chat interface. It's rock solid. I find it hard to understand which model it's using though. Am I already using Argon, or does it switch models according to the subject?

Are they gonna go to Krypton or Neon next? Kinda started in the middle there.

Glad to see them abandon the absolute train wreck of their model naming "strategy".

Gemini Live vs. Gemini Lite vs. Gemini Pro vs. Gemini Flash vs. Nano Banana Lite (that one apparently has no Gemini prefix?)... Please, just pick a metaphor and stick with it without wildly mixing reasoning modes, model sizes, and input/output modalities in the model name!

can for the love of god we get some usage in cheaper subscriptions being Ultra tier only is annoying. I want to just test it out here, well will burn some money via api I guess.

Fable 5.5 about to drop the hammer on them and then another Astra version goes out lol.

very bad

baaad

>"Argon helped the Chrome team separate core webpage handling from a ~6 million line legacy folder of browser features held within Chromium’s 40 million-line codebase. Piping multiple clean code changes at a time, Argon helped the team finish an architectural refactor across hundreds of files, completing months of work in weeks."

Now that needed to be done for some time!

Regardless of if an AI helped or not, regardless of whether that was Google's or some other AI or not (though Argon does sound pretty cool!), regardless of whether an AI cut the time from months to weeks or not, refactoring Chrome -- decomposing it into individual clearly demarcated non-tightly coupled software parts with core webpage handling at the center -- that needed to be done for some time!

Now all of that being said, Gemini 4 Argon does sound pretty cool, and we congratulate both teams at Google -- the team that created Gemini 4 Argon, and the team that refactored Chrome with it!

But all of that being said, while the advancements made for Gemini 4 Argon are important and impressive (and they are!)... refactoring Chrome properly (IMHO) is slightly more important and impressive!

(You know, one man's humble opinion! That is, I am not the guy who is responsible for awarding performance-based bonuses at Google at the end of the year, so take everything I say with the proverbial "grain of salt"! :-) I am probably biased, one way or the other! :-) )

Why can't the Gemini model code? I'd guess Gemini probably used the best dataset. Even Google is the place where the world's best coders are gathered, isn't it? Yet the GPT code from OpenAI, which collaborated with Microsoft, is beautiful, while the Gemini model's coding is trash.

not available in our org (EU)

Meanwhile I paid a subscription and they only provide access to 3.6 Flash. Consequently, I have moved on to open-weight models. It is what happens when you screw your customers over.

3.1 Gemini was amazing for anything non-agentic. I switched to it for my primary chatbot purposes.

I never touch 3.8, it's awful. Curious to try this, but I've yet to use any Gemini that is good for agentic work.

Also, unrelated but this made me look at Artificial Analysis to see where it lands on Cost per Task, and it ranks Opus 5.5 at almost double Astra 6. That does not align with my experience.

Now let me use Pi on the plan.

why they wait so long ?????

It may be a good model, but I'm not reading scrollslop. It annoys me to much when I'm just trying to get information about something.

Not available for AI Pro subscribers in Antigravity. What a disappointment.

Google...why. You keep getting so close but constantly fumble at the last moment. I can use Opus 5.5 and Sol/Astra on the $20 Anthropic and OpenAI plans.

You are already playing from behind. You need to GET YOUR MODELS INTO MORE PEOPLES HANDS by any means possible. Continuing to make it difficult to use your products DOES NOT HELP.

This model might be great but the majority aren't going to subscribe for $100/month just to try it.

so this is prob why antigravity is not working well at the moment lol

Blatantly obvious that models will not slow down. For any task, if we can build a dataset or environment of verifications, it can be automated. This will eat all of human tasks.

The fact that multiple companies can breach any benchmark means there is no ambiguity in terms of how to build AI, its just a matter of time.

Certainly Meta and Google are benchmaxxing to please public markets, but it still proves the above

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People use Antigravity still?