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Gemini 4 Argon

https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/
247•737max•57m ago•211 comments

Apple HomeView

https://www.apple.com/apple-homeview/
402•etothet•3h ago•517 comments

Thunderbird for iOS

https://blog.thunderbird.net/2026/10/thunderbird-for-ios-a-first-look-at-the-native-iphone-email-...
97•mjorgers•1h ago•31 comments

11 year old unsoundness bugs found in Rust borrow checker

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/164250
512•formerly_proven•6h ago•299 comments

I posted to HN, and then my website was flooded with AI bot traffic

https://www.sammystraus.com/#i-posted-to-hn-and-then-my-website-was-flooded-with-ai-bot-traffic
70•sammy0910•1h ago•35 comments

Coris (YC S22) Is Hiring Back End Engineer

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/coris/jobs/h0nDly8-backend-engineer-ai-native-risk-infrastr...
1•smaddali•19s ago

We turned EmbeddingGemma 2 into a speech-to-text model

https://eg2.haku.sh/
296•amrrs•5h ago•69 comments

A Dynamic and Distributed Virtual GPU Cloud Built on Idle Apple Silicon Devices

https://machinelearning.apple.com/research/distributed-gpu-cloud
166•acossta•4h ago•67 comments

Cyberattack halts construction of tunnel between Denmark and Germany

https://ua.news/en/world/kiberataka-zupinila-budivnitstvo-tuneliu-mizh-daniieiu-ta-nimechchinoiu-...
11•paaloeye•36m ago•2 comments

New Apple TV 4K

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/10/apple-unveils-the-new-apple-tv-4k/
128•corvad•3h ago•239 comments

MIT class project turns into an FDA-cleared treatment for tremors

https://news.mit.edu/2026/mit-class-project-turns-into-fda-cleared-treatment-for-tremors-1002
13•zdw•21h ago•2 comments

Worlds More Habitable Than Earth? They're Out There

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/13/science/inhabitable-planets-solar-system.html
31•cainxinth•4h ago•32 comments

Launch HN: Consus (YC F24) – LLM gateway for companies handling sensitive data

13•ericmags•1h ago•4 comments

BB(10) > Graham's Number

https://github.com/jeff87654/busy-beaver/blob/main/BB10/1RB0RA_1LC1LF_1RD0LB_1RA1LE_1LI0LC_0RG1LD...
53•surprisetalk•4h ago•28 comments

Show HN: Use your OpenAI subscription to create audiobooks

https://pdftomp3.com/connect-ai/
130•janpmz•6h ago•64 comments

Hittite royal archive found in Turkey

https://www.thehistoryblog.com/archives/77107
270•benbreen•10h ago•70 comments

A Visual Intro to Complex Numbers

https://photonlines.substack.com/p/a-visual-intro-to-complex-numbers
75•surprisetalk•5h ago•48 comments

Character.ai has initiated voluntary Chapter 11 bankruptcy

https://blog.character.ai/an-update-on-character-ai/
165•nryoo•9h ago•185 comments

How to engineer an AI harness for game development

https://kylekukshtel.com/ai-harness-engineering-game-development-claude-code
17•kkukshtel•2h ago•4 comments

AI is a tool and using it well takes skill

https://yyhh.org/blog/2026/10/ai-is-a-tool/
572•layer8•19h ago•457 comments

CFTC Staff Were Told to Retract Analysis of Suspicious Oil Trades

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-10-13/cftc-staff-told-to-retract-analysis-of-suspici...
372•helsinkiandrew•6h ago•177 comments

Mozilla Introduces Firefox Enterprise

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/enterprise/
343•recvonline•5h ago•157 comments

GLM-Legal

https://z.ai/blog/glm-legal
649•ilreb•1d ago•352 comments

The baffling intelligence of a single cell (2024)

https://jsomers.net/e-coli-chemotaxis/
374•jsomers•2d ago•117 comments

The United Kingdom Generates Less Electricity per Person Than in the 1970s

https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/electricity-generation-per-person-in-the-united-kingdom-...
38•karakoram•1h ago•14 comments

Hackers activate automatic defrosting in supermarket fridges across Europe

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/unprecedented-cyberattack-cripples-supe...
844•Zeekaas•1d ago•947 comments

Intel D270 GPU AI Accelerator–Up to 480 GB LPDDR5X

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/details/discrete-gpus/data-center-gpu/d-series.html
291•hurricanepootis•19h ago•166 comments

A Modern Web App in C

https://prophitt.me/writing/a-modern-web-app-in-c
672•prophittcorey•1d ago•294 comments

Document Review with Unsiloed and TypeSafe Jev

https://www.unsiloed.ai/blog/document-review-unsiloed-typesafe-jev
39•ritzaco•8h ago•7 comments

Americans Trust in Federal Government Sinks to New Depths

https://news.gallup.com/poll/715361/trust-federal-government-sinks-new-depths.aspx
4•giuliomagnifico•12m ago•1 comments
Open in hackernews

Gemini 4 Argon

https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/
246•737max•57m ago

Comments

username_my1•52m ago
not available in our org (EU)
idbnstra•51m ago
so this is prob why antigravity is not working well at the moment lol
w4yai•51m ago
not available. classic google.
nitinreddy88•51m ago
not available yet. why to launch something that can never be used even after weeks
bigyabai•49m ago
Because Mythos started an arms-race for "models that are too smart for you" and other labs are jealous.
theplumber•30m ago
Yeah, I think this is it! Google tried to hype their model but they have no chance against queen Dario. Perhaps they should just delete Gmail and say that Gemini did it. That way they would get some attention …
bigyabai•29m ago
Quoting Kai Lentit: "Google agents have been hacking Google internally for years."

https://youtu.be/DlTNN0gvkLM

modeless•48m ago
Page says it is now available to Ultra and Pro subscribers. Although in AI Studio it currently says you need Ultra. But it's technically released either way.
llmslave•50m ago
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

efficax•45m ago
but they have slowed down. the delta in capability between model releases now is smaller than ever before and i expect it to continue to diminish until we reach some kind of asymptotic maximum, which hopefully will mean turn towards optimization and local model improvements. The current frontier models running at 10x the tok/s would be incredible for my use cases
alecst•40m ago
We're not living in the same universe. Look at capability year-over-year. The asymptotic maximum is wishful thinking. Someone needs to step in before this gets wildly out of control.
verdverm•35m ago
Year-over-year, yes I would agree with you, but that is not the cycle time of models. And while I share the same hunch as GP, I'm waiting another cycle before putting more confidence behind it.
isqueiros•31m ago
> Someone needs to step in before this gets wildly out of control. This sounds like a paid bot, lmao.

I wonder how much is actual improvements in the model and how much comes from better harnesses. I'd be willing to bet that the combination of better harnesses + the models being trained around agentic workflows (i.e the harnesses) has made it significantly better in many things, but it's hard to find other improvements imo.

IanCal•49m ago
> built to solve your hardest problems

Like a working scroll on a webpage.

God damn this is impossible to use of safari mobile.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs•47m ago
Coding is solved, scrolling not yet :)
jedbrooke•47m ago
worked ok for me on ios safari, but probably because I have the “reduce motion” setting enabled. Every day that setting feels more justified
InvisibleUp•46m ago
It literally can’t load in my mobile web browser without running out of memory and force-refreshing.
jstummbillig•38m ago
Clicked on "Performance". Scrolled to "Safety".
pierreozoux•38m ago
I have a more than 10 years old laptop, same feeling here!
throwawayy6767•33m ago
If you can't afford a Google engineer's high-end device that doesn't lag you don't matter to them :)
tekacs•49m ago
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.
catigula•47m ago
I'm a Pro user and I do not have it. Seems scuffed.
owlninja•47m ago
I'm Ultra and seeing it now (US)
verdverm•41m ago
> Seems scuffed.

I like this phrasing and am curious what new word or phrase we might use to describe big companies over pushing Ai internally at the expense of their product quality. This pattern is so ubiquitous across google cloud products I have taken to calling them the 21st century IBM, having been a IBM baby and witnessing first hand their fall from exceptionalism.

wyldberry•38m ago
The internet and gaming has ruined my brain because scuffed was a way to describe a bad dungeon run in mythic plus dungeons in WoW, or a bad tower dive in LoL a few years ago. I see scuffed and think "here's a WoW/League knower".
catigula•34m ago
Interesting. I don't play either LoL or retail WoW, but I am a historical WoW player.
vegnus•48m ago
People use Antigravity still?
bla3•48m ago
It's alright.
zf00002•48m ago
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.
mridulmalpani•47m ago
It's available for gemini pro users.
aliljet•47m ago
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.

nateb2022•45m ago
I pay Google a reasonable price for 5TB storage/backup across GMail/Docs/etc. Any AI they throw in with that is icing on top of the cake.
hersko•5m ago
What plan is this? How much a month?
sroussey•40m ago
Yeah, Gemini 1.5 might be the most used (certainly by consumers) ai model. That is the one used by Google Search AI Answers.
cubefox•31m ago
False. Last information was that Google Search uses Gemini 3 Flash-lite. Gemini 1.5 is totally outdated and used nowhere.
sroussey•27m ago
Oh, I didn't notice that they switched from 1.5 to 3 flash about six months ago. I know someone there and they talked about how 1.5 was hardened and it was a pain to do so on newer models that is wasn't worth it for a long time. But that convo was in the beginning of the year. I should have looked it up.
sva_•47m ago
Not available in my browser/app yet (pro), but I'm confident it'll roll out soon.

That was a long wait.

algoth1•47m ago
Gemini 3.1 is still SOTA at weird handwriting recognition. If Argon is better it will be amazing
spwa4•11m ago
I bet that's one of those areas where a finetune of a 4B model will wipe the floor with anything else.
timpera•46m ago
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.
verdverm•38m ago
I laughed for the first half of the greatest "slop deck" their cloud sales team sent us, until other emotions like disappointment took over.
postalcoder•45m ago
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.

algoth1•35m ago
I missed the em dash — ngl
postexitus•30m ago
What was botched about it?
postalcoder•25m ago
Announced 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 ("Must who?"). The hype died down bc nobody could touch the models and meta/muse came out with a similarly capable model in the meanwhile.

In the meanwhile, OpenAI had a disastrous dev day where a ton of users jumped ship to go to Claude.

Model 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.

axblount•45m ago
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?

robotmay•27m ago
Seconded. Anthropic feel the need to limit how abusive you can be to Claude because god, I want to throttle that snotty little shit. Google don't have to do that with Gemini because it just isn't as irritating. It does what I ask and doesn't try to second-guess my requests, or do "the quick fix".
chpatrick•19m ago
I'm the opposite, I found Gemini so annoying that I had to stop using it, Claude was a breath of fresh air afterwards.
alex1138•7m ago
It's been really bad at lyrics but gotten better. You look something up and it will just make something up and it takes a bit of digging to discover it's because of copyright
jordemort•45m ago
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?"

GodelNumbering•45m ago
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.

Corence•38m ago
I feel like this is a quirk of LMSYS-style optimization where humans in SxS preference evals will pick based on formatting more than actual content.
Insanity•44m ago
> 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).

melasadra•23m ago
I mean, don't we want engineers to dogfood their own product so that they know it's strengths and weaknesses and be in position to improve it?
rw2•44m ago
Fable 5.5 about to drop the hammer on them and then another Astra version goes out lol.
yoz-y•39m ago
And so the game of cat and mouse goes on. Your point being?
DataDaoDe•44m ago
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".

aleksiy123•40m ago
I think in this case it’s from the element argon
DataDaoDe•32m ago
Yes probably but that's still from Greek (see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argon#History)
ralusek•43m ago
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.

bezko•43m ago
can't use in agy with Pro subscription:

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

redox99•43m ago
Only available in the $100 plan, and it's worse than Opus 5.5? Why would you ever buy this?
theplumber•32m ago
Because you have an android phone and don’t want to mess around with anything else(i.e the same reason people just use internet explorer on windows) or you hold Google stock so you want to support your investment :)
nateb2022•26m ago
> Only available in the $100 plan

Source? Their documentation says it's available on the $20 plan and I can confirm firsthand.

https://one.google.com/intl/en_us/about/google-ai-plans/

redox99•25m ago
Not for coding (antigravity).

https://x.com/OfficialLoganK/status/2110038940841545827

damsta•43m ago
> 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?

nananana9•40m ago
It's irrelevant information, they know the reader switches models every week.
dyauspitr•2m ago
They don’t really. Most normies which are the vast majority of people just use ChatGPT. All tech folk just use Claude.
simonw•37m ago
They're doubling the price on December 1st: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/pricing#gemini-4-argon

$2/million input and $10/million output today. $4/$20 after December 1st.

logicchains•31m ago
>$4/$20

Is Elon Musk doing their pricing?

square_usual•25m ago
simonw•42m ago
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.

zzulanas•41m ago
what is even the point of these now? labs are most definitely training on this question now. I feel like this test scratches the surface of a "real" test for these new models
simonw•39m ago
It attracts at least one comment like yours on every single thread, so I guess the main purpose is to kick off a race to see who can post that comment first.
32297•34m ago
Yeah the main point of a 120 DB noisy party at 4 in the morning is to see which neighbor complains first and then make gleeful comments about it!
osiris970•42m ago
Can’t even get it on pro tier in antigravity?

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

rcr-anti•41m ago
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.

mistic92•41m ago
I'm pro and I see that I need to be Ultra to use Argon :/
robotmay•9m ago
Honestly not even that is enough, I exhausted the limit within 5 minutes of trying to use it. I'll stick to Flash I think.
Trusteando•41m ago
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.
yoz-y•40m ago
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.
freakynit•40m ago
"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.

ArashEdalat•29m ago
Geometry could be understood today with the model but what also really matters is the sensing, friction, mass how smooth the subjects are, dexterity is a very difficult problem so solve, not sure how simulations could handle such factors
verdverm•26m ago
Game engines have many of these features. At one point, iirc, Unity was positioning to be the simulation environment for world model agents before we spoke about it in these words.
129751•39m ago
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.

david-gpu•38m ago
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.
Havoc•33m ago
You can probably get 3.8 via ai studio interface.

God knows why the server different things to the same people on different interfaces

pietz•37m ago
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.
swaptr•26m ago
I appreciate how it's being integrated into the Google ecosystem, but the user experience still feels unpolished when actually using the system. The marketing, however, is impressive.
sureglymop•36m ago
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.

ezfe•34m ago
Maybe it’s just an incomplete rollout not fraud lol
verdverm•24m ago
don't attribute to malice that which can equally be due to incompetence
tireonfire•34m ago
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.
protoman3000•33m ago
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.

jug•9m ago
Yeah rumor ahead of release was also that some Googlers were anxious about the known subpar coding given modern trends.
TomGarden•6m ago
Same, gemini for writing is the strongest. Qwen was also surprisingly good last time I did a shootout
thisisauserid•33m ago
Here's how the 1M token output (long decode) works: https://ai.google.dev/gemini-api/docs/long-decode
meerita•32m ago
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.
ainch•32m ago
Not available for me on Pro in the UK.
nateb2022•25m ago
As with the previous Gemini releases, rollout is batched.
d2kx•31m ago
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
babelfish•30m ago
I saw 'jargon-free' and my eyes immediately glazed over
d2kx•26m ago
hahaha. I also build a site (also using Gemini 4 Argon) that makes the data more accessible: https://www.dmh.dev/voynich
mattmanser•9m ago
> An interactive companion to our ongoing exploration

Eyes glazed over again.

Did you even read your own site before you posted it?

One of the first pages I opened:

> Smoking-gun proof of plant-label ingestion: in Row 2, the central cut root is labeled okol (f88r.15), and directly underneath it on Line 2 (f88r.19) the recipe writes...chokol daiin qoekol qoekol qockhol okol cheol...!

It's just gibberish.

scotty79•29m ago
Are they gonna go to Krypton or Neon next? Kinda started in the middle there.
simonw•27m ago
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.

isityettime•19m ago
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.]

didibus•17m ago
Pretty sure your phone assistant isn't using their best model. It's probably using one of the old flash models no?
kingstnap•5m ago
When you ask stuff in your car on android auto it uses 3.5 flash-lite. The response details would include it in the logs.

Flash lite is very noticeably more idiotic than 3.8 Flash. It's why the quick AI overview is often much worse than the AI mode one.

moffkalast•11m ago
Sounds like it might not have your precise location in context?
jeffbee•6m ago
It sounds like the tool call is probably not grounded with your precise position.
eluusive•17m ago
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:

bushbaba•15m ago
Curious what this means for the anthropic ipo. Between this and meta, seems like there’s zero moat
karahime•14m ago
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.
jdw64•12m ago
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.
robotmay•9m ago
I have no problem with Gemini Flash 3.8 for coding, though I only use Elixir which is one of the better languages for LLMs. Where does it fall short elsewhere?
dmix•9m ago
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.

TomGarden•8m ago
Pretty sure Opus 5.5 can do this with code only now. Seen a lot of strong motion design skills floating around
ramoz•5m ago
I dont have that problem with opus5.5. I dont even take the screenshots anymore (it does all screen recordings)... I tell it a simple narrative and it follows through. e.g. https://x.com/plannotator/status/2108589088139886769?s=20
DrProtic•2m ago
I literally did that with Opus today and it did a great job.

I told it to strip screenshots from our old basic explainer video to generate modern 3D video.

Pretty happy with the result. I told it to keep the audio and match the video and it did.

jjcm•6m ago
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...

jjcm•5m ago
One interesting observation - it's the only one I've seen make an ASCII representation of the layout of each of the pages before building: https://image.non.io/46e0cce3-34d9-4fcb-8775-bfc2c70bc4bb.we...
sergiotapia•4m ago
Damn opus 5.5 is just such a good model - what kind of moloch sacrifices are they doing in there
bobviolier•2m ago
I don't know how you rate, but the Opus 5.5 is literally stuttering and lagging when scrolling on a Macbook Air M3

(Chrome, also incognito)

lxgr•5m ago
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!

tonyhart7•4m ago
why they wait so long ?????
jawiggins•3m ago
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.

Trusteando•3m ago
In this moment there are two top post one about GLM-Legal and other about Argon, both score almost the same in the Harvey Lab test, but prices are $0.15 versus $10.55, the $0.15 is a Vals AI's estimate using the base model since GLM-Legal has not published prices.
dyauspitr•1m ago
Yeah, but one is a general purpose model, and the other one is specifically geared towards the legal field.
mridulmalpani•1m ago
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)

cwoolfe•1m ago
Here I was thinking Google had given up on frontier models...
npn•1m ago
[delayed]
llmslave•36m ago
opus 5.5 is a step change, you arent using the models enough if you think there is a slowdown
verdverm•34m ago
I do not see the current training regime of "relentlessly try anything to get the task done" as a true step change in intelligence. This is one of the reasons I suspect capability acquisition is slowing.

A more intelligent model would not default to spaghetti throwing, it would pause to consider the problem fundamentals, the accuracy of assumptions, and ask questions that remove ambiguity. This however does not lend itself to increasing token sales while prices remain inflated from market and brand dominance.

david-gpu•35m ago
Models just solved a Millennium price and you think their progress is slowing down? I will concede that their capabilities vary a lot from one field to another, but still.
cma•35m ago
A little over a year ago they were winning their first gold in an elite high school math competition. Have you not seen what they are doing in math now?
medler•22m ago
I have a high-end device and the page still behaves atrociously for me. The scrolling is totally out of whack
oh_no•30m ago
also a mess on desktop firefox
cmrdporcupine•37m ago
HP is the other company to consider as analogous. And maybe more explicitly so, as they had a similar "engineering first" internal culture that degraded markedly over time to be a shadow of their former self.

And took similar companies that were quality engineering focused -- like DEC or Palm -- down with them through acquisition.

kridsdale1•24m ago
HP was deliberately destroyed by its moron of a CEO.
cmrdporcupine•1m ago
They were frankly on the decline a long time before that though.
mistic92•41m ago
I'm getting popup that I need to be Ultra :D
xbmcuser•38m ago
Not really this is how they always release stuff in batches so can roll back if something is wrong so people get access over time
w4yai•41m ago
Pro user - I can't see it.
fridder•39m ago
Nope only Ultra. I went into Antigravity to check
ano-ther•39m ago
OpenRouter seems to have it: https://openrouter.ai/google/gemini-4-argon
PorciiVorbesc•38m ago
Pro subscriber in the EU (via Indian discount code) and don't have it.
moecables•33m ago
Pro user here, don't see it in the Gemini app
wslh•33m ago
Checked, and already in Antigravity (as the page said).
Gallows4574•31m ago
It's available for me (pro sub) in Antigravity after I ran an update.
melasadra•26m ago
Huh ? Am also on Pro sub but Antigravity IDE say's that it's only available for Ultra users.

EDIT:

Apparently Ultra subscribers gets Argon everywhere including in Google Antigravity

Pro subscribers only get them in Gemini app and Search

jonesy827•19m ago
Interesting, Google's own article says it's rolling out today to Ultra subscribers. No mention of Pro.

https://antigravity.google/blog/gemini-4-argon-in-google-ant...

caminanteblanco•31m ago
It looks like Pro can use argon in the Gemini app, but not in antigravity:

https://one.google.com/about/google-ai-plans/?icid=microsite...

freakynit•26m ago
Im on pro, installed gemini app, tried argon 4, keeps failing with 404, resource now found. Switched to gemini-3.8-flash in same session... worked.

It seems to be rolling out gradually.. not available at once to everyone.

yegle•29m ago
It's showing up in Antigravity on mobile UI as "unavailable" for Pro user (you can use Remote Control to access its web UI).

It doesn't show in the desktop UI.

rahimnathwani•29m ago
Not available to me on gemini.google.com (Pro, USA).
frangonf•27m ago
In agy 1.3.4

> Gemini 4 Argon (Medium)

  Unavailable · Gemini 4 Argon is currently available to Ultra plan subscribers.
schleck8•27m ago
I'm on Pro and it's trying to get me to upgrade to Ultra in the AI Studio UI when using Argon. In Antigravity CLI and the Gemini website it's not showing up at all despite being logged in
hnfong•24m ago
As far as I can tell, I can successfully call Gemini 4 via API now.
dbuser99•35m ago
How is this behind the curve? Seriously
tireonfire•33m ago
Isn't OPUS much cheaper and generally regarded as more intelligent?
verdverm•29m ago
Afaict, they are targeting difference user bases, Google being after their existing user base, having lost in the developer ecosystem to the two labs and open weight models.
steego•12m ago
If you’re going to argue they’re targeting a different user base, then I think you should tell us who they’re targeting.

More specifically, who are they targeting with Argon and why is it behind the Ultra plan? Who is paying $99/month if not developers?

steego•16m ago
Are you suggesting it’s BETTER than their competitors?

Because if it’s not, and it’s not available to all paying users (Right now, it’s only available to Ultra users), then they are behind the curve if they’re treating it like Fable.

It’s tone deaf.

I_am_tiberius•34m ago
Moreover, you need a Google account in order to use it. I wouldn't bother paying 200 USD for it but I just don't want an entire google tracking package just for using one product.
w4yai•21m ago
You can use an alt account. Or buy an old one for couple dollars, without security measures.
redox99•19m ago
> I bet they actually resolve more LLM requests than any other company at this point. The lay person still uses Google exclusively.

Unique users, maybe. But a simple query that's answered in a paragraph is negligible compared to devs running agents continuously for tens of hours.

That is the standard pricing for Opus-class models these days.
eptcyka•1m ago
Blaze it, Robot!
nateb2022•29m ago
With the pace they're delivering models, there's gonna be 1-2 new Gemini 4 versions by December 1st, presumably with their own introductory price windows. We just got Gemini 3.8 on 2 September and Gemini 3.7 on 13 August.
vineyardmike•20m ago
I wonder if that’s more to price in the cost of keeping old models around on expensive inference hardware. It’s not like old models get cheaper to run, and a more heterogeneous fleet is less efficient to manage.
damsta•27m ago
Opus 5.5 is also priced at $4/$20, but are they on the same level?
jklinger410•15m ago
Obfuscating token cost is the new great marketing frontier
hyperparticles•8m ago
The roof is always raising month over month. If you were to make a harder version of the benchmark, what do you think you'd like to see the agents do better?
129751•38m ago
Memes and self-promotion.
algoth1•38m ago
I enjoy it. Many readers here look specifically for Simon's pelican comment when a new model launches
HelloMcFly•36m ago
It's merely become part of the culture of new model drops even as it's become a bit less useful as a diagnostic.
soperj•36m ago
low version doesn't have a chain.

Medium and high are fixies apparently, (or they have a worm gear, although the hub doesn't look big enough for that), since neither has a derailleur. That would also explain the lack of brakes at least.

Low is still obviously failing the "test". It's pedals are not actually attached to the bike either.

Medium has a handlebar that goes through the pelican's beak. So I'd say also failing.

For the high, the only nitpick would be that the bell isn't quite on the handlebars and the stripes on his scarf don't line up correctly.

rdtsc•38m ago
Me in 2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44759781

> If it's on HN and is a meme at this point, it will end up in the training set.

> It's kind of fun to imagine that there is an intern in every AI company furiously trying to get nice looking svg pelicans on bicycles.

Google listened and assigned a few interns, I guess, for the task

eli•35m ago
SVG is useful for actual tasks, not just looking good in a silly "benchmark"
PorciiVorbesc•7m ago
What I'd kill for would be an app where you take a pic of scribbles and drawings on a whiteboard/notebook and the app turns it into SVGs you can then continue to manipulate digitally on PC/tablet.
gh0stcat•1m ago
Why would you kill for this? Why not just generate svgs with any editing software?
sulam•24m ago
I end up getting SVG output for all kinds of things, and never once have I asked for, or gotten, a pelican.
afavour•21m ago
Certainly true but I think the question is “does targeting the SVG pelican mean that the quality of all SVG output improves?” If so it’s a worthwhile thing to target.
compiler-guy•51s ago
It's a little bit like any benchmark, especially microbenchmarks. It is useful as far as it reflects the real world, but the risk of overfitting to the specific task and not the general one is very high.
gcanyon•1m ago
Maybe so, and yet it's still not enough -- the pelicans all have flaws.

They look remarkably good, sure -- but not perfect.

bilsbie•38m ago
Regarding the pelican test. Maybe someone will know this.

Modern models can make nearly photorealistic games in threejs. So why do they struggle with these pelicans?

simonw•34m ago
The models that are really good at 3D modeling tend to also be really good at pelicans. I think the skills are strongly related - it's about having good 2D (and now 3D) spatial awareness.

The test is always going to be hard though, because it's an absurd image to ask for.

UPDATE: I like this theory about using an agentic harness that can render and iterate better: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50073879#50074395

jephs•31m ago
The pelicans are one-shot with not tools: Think a bunch, write a bunch of SVG, done.

The pretty 3d stuff you see are agents controlling a Blender MCP in a loop where they look at the scene, think, adjust the scene, repeat.

simonw•26m ago
Yeah, that's a good point. My basic pelican test doesn't allow the model to render their work and iterate on it. The 3D models all come from agent systems that are rendering with Blender or screenshotting with Playwright along the way.
vineyardmike•23m ago
I’d really like to see what each model comes up with if given a basic harness to render and iterate. They’ve all gotten pretty good at basic one shot pelicans, but seeing what they do when given a direct goal, and even getting a time lapse of each image as they edit and adjust would be really fun.
Perz1val•31m ago
Have you tried editing SVG by hand?
sobiolite•22m ago
A lot depends on what the models were specifically trained for using reinforcement learning. Modern models are generally OK and everything, but they're only really good at the things they have extensive RL for.
TeMPOraL•13m ago
"Pelican on bicycle in SVG" is an adversarial example on multiple levels - out of distribution, ill choose of tool for the task, and anatomical impossibility of real pelicans using typical bycicles.
charcircuit•2m ago
But often these models mess up drawing even just the bicycle part.
postalcoder•38m ago
It's obvious OAI hillclimbs the image generation -> SVG loop. I'd put money down on that being why OAI's pelicans have a yellowish tint that matches the yellow tint of OAI's earlier image models.
kart23•38m ago
still radial spokes on both wheels of the bike which is disappointing. no real bicycle is built this way
squidbeak•12m ago
Buddy, there's a Pelican riding it. No real cloud is like that, no real sea is like that, no real gulls are like that. And that's fine because it's a cartoon.
huseyinkeles•31m ago
Wow, those are I think the best looking pelicans ever so far
Fraterkes•30m ago
Honestly surprising if other labs aren’t training for svg generation. Feel like SVG’s are going to be really useful for dynamic UI generation stuff that goes beyond cobbling Html together
perardi•29m ago
You can really see the effort in the details.

Subtle highlights on the metal frame, sweat beads, jaunty little hat…it has style. At least compared to the rather literal ChatGPT outputs. https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/gpt-pelicans-gr...

jameshart•14m ago
Is it me or is there maybe some carryover happening where the pelicans are portrayed as expending different degrees of effort too? Like, the high effort pelican has a determined look on his face.

Is the prompt context telling the models what their effort level is, and the ambient presence of that concept of ‘high effort’ in the context window is leaking through and affecting the portrayal?

simonw•10m ago
I don't know if this is how the OpenAI effort levels work, but for Qwen 3.8 27B the effort level really does get translated into the prompt.

https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.8-27B/blob/main/chat_templ...

xhigh: "Reasoning effort is set to xhigh. Please think carefully through the task, validate key assumptions, consider plausible alternatives, and prioritize correctness, consistency, and clarity in the final answer."

low: "Reasoning effort is set to low. Keep your thinking brief and focused, moving directly to the conclusion without unnecessary elaboration."

LarsDu88•22m ago
simonw, your pelicans are so famous now that the frontier labs can just RLVR for SVG images explicitly.

It's a simple manner of prompt...generate concept art with nanobanana, measure, llm creates svg with text, measure the distance between rasterized svg embedding to nanobanana art....do post-training RL on a 3 million such images and matching embeddings.

I swear this will be a canonical example of Goodhardt's Law in action.

You have to switch to a new benchmark that isn't so easy to run a verifiable rewards pipeline on...Perhaps a longer horizon task where it's easy to mess up midway.

jameshart•12m ago
Why? Don’t you think the steady improvement in pelican bicycling SVG art is itself a worthy field of endeavor for LLMs to be optimized for?

Yes, Simon has made pelicans a benchmark and now models have grown very good at rendering them. Is there a reason to believe that this isn’t manifesting as useful skill in general in SVG generation?

whoamii•21m ago
Simon’s headstone is going to have a pelican on a bicycle, isn’t it
mceachen•13m ago
He deserves a full parliament
yuhmahp•19m ago
doesn't this mean that you should change the pelican test to something else?
simonw•15m ago
If a result is suspiciously good I run a spot check with one of my many other SVG things.

Here's 'Generate an SVG of an armadillo in fishnet tights jaywalking on Mars' for Gemini 4 Argon: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

Some other models for comparison: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer?url=ht...

make3•10m ago
The models are solving Millennium Prize questions and making progress on the Riemann Hypothesis, yet the top comment is still looking at pelicans somehow. To me, it feels even more superficial and pointless than arguing about the presidential candidates' tie choices in a debate.
dyauspitr•6m ago
Holy shit, these are like art. Especially the bikes.
gcanyon•2m ago
Excellent, but not perfect -- if google really is training to pelicans, then clearly they are not capable of perfect pelicans.

As one point, the high pelican's arm is see-through/messed up.

They do look worlds better than previously, to be fair.