Its sad watching them try to keep up when they want nothing more than to crumble under the weight of their own bureaucracy, and at this point I'm not sure there's any hope for them.

1. Ultra - The best and the most expensive for showing off and government. 2. Pro - Almost best but substantially cheaper for most productive people. 3. Flash - Workhorse for everyone. 4. Lite - For the unwashed masses and peasants.

There is no need to attach anything to these labels. In fact industry could simply standardize these namings like SEMVER.

There could be an internal representation which could give specific number of the model but these companies should move on to be more like Chrome. No one knows or cares which version of chrome they are on.

For a lot of systems the real underlying version would matter because of reliability. That can be provided to those power users.

https://i.imgur.com/IDFGuJU.jpeg

Doing this two hours before today's earnings report.

It's probably going to be a terrible earnings call in terms of capital expenditure, cash flow and new borrowing.

This is probably the single most important thing to make frontier models usable right now, so I'm happy there seems to be some progress. This was the previous Gemini's biggest problem IMO

Is Argon "pro" and Carbon "ultra"?

Is Argon obsolete now? Does Carbon replace it or live alongside of it?

Very confusing naming!

"We patched every vulnerability we knew". Meanwhile, prompt-injecting Argon (or any other model) is still trivial, and Carbon won't be an exception. Because the attacker is not limited to things Google has evaluated.

AI shops are blind to anything that's not a metric.

deepmind should get rid of those antigravity ppl they're a joke and sabotaging the model's reputation.

Is it a variant of Argon? A different model? The next version? It seems like this is a separate class (like Anthropic's Mythos).

anyway, its needlessly confusing.

But what naming is this, I thought Google goes into a similar direction with naming as the others, so a "Argon" is similar to a Astra, and then there's Flash and Pro as the middle tiers, but if they just call models with random names now it 'll get super confusing

Basically everyone[0] thought yesterday's update looked suspect, even before we knew about Carbon.

Did Google coordinate with AAI on any aspect of this in a non-public way? Is this the sort of thing a publicly-traded company would be obliged to disclose, if they were involved in it? AAI isn't a regulated company (private), but the stuff they print influences stock prices.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50268868 ("Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5")

What a coincidence it is!

Again, no access to open source developers. The AI companies want bugs for dramatic public relations! Also, of course there aren't enough bugs so they have to be rationed for the "defenders" and future models.

3.8 flash is a really solid "everyday" model. Was hoping a new flash model would be the next release.

So more capable and same price? I can at least appreciate that

Like why does Google keep announcing models that are not publicly available

    - 3.6 Flash
    - 3.8 Thinking
    - 3.1 Pro

Back I go to the Antigravity pricing page and there is a tier "For Organisations". But now I have the option of either contacting sales (are you kidding me?) or "Start now via the API".

So I'm out - I want a simple subscription like Claude or Codex. I don't want API enterprise pricing for a 2 person organisation. I could use my personal account but I'm already paying increased Google Workspace prices to access Gemini and I can't even use the latest models with that.

If someone at Google sees this, flag this ridiculous behaviour please and get things under control. It should be a very clear process - don't show me things I can't access. Price things consistently and please just make things logical.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50073879

If all you want to prove is your internal models deserve a seat at the big boy table, maybe OpenAI and Anthropic should also release benchmarks for GPT 11 and Opus 9, launching in 2030.

https://www.ft.com/content/8158cb5a-4bbd-43fd-b329-15a54e842...

Nitpick.. "Model API Naming", I wish you would in all releases or announcement have a small section about what the latest model is called in the API.

Anthropic is really good with this. I can reliability predict whats the model API name just from the announcement.

I always have to first google whats the naming+version for gemini models (api).

Love the options but also I hope Google understands that they need to now compete on many dimensions for developers. Google probably will still win huge shares of the consumer market, though frontier intelligence will have little to do with it, other than the RSI aspect.

This has to be an intentional echoing of the "pace the frontier" language?

How badly will their product decisions (fumbles) hold back what those models can accomplish? As a token provider, with a decent model, sure. I'd be happy to use them.

But I'm not sure I can easily be convinced to buy into their higher level (ChatGPT-esque) experiences

I’d like to think other labs are making similar progress but hold their cards closer to their chests. Because it doesn’t seem that there’s much value signaling capability ahead of release unless you are “behind” in market capture.

I use DeepSeek too but it’s more of a workhorse model, requires a lot more guiding and sometimes struggles to get where I want it.

Also Carbon is lighter than Argon. So lighter is apparently better?

What comes next? Gemini 4 Helium?

I believe that we need multiple labs building great models and am glad google is investing heavily to be at the frontier.

Excited to try it, opus level benchmarks with their omniscience score and multimodality seems worth testing!

“Helium” in Spanish is “Helio.” And Helios was the most powerful AI in the Deus Ex universe… Coincidence??

Clicks link

Carbon isn't anywhere on the page and you can't toggle it on either. I'm sure it's just timing and it will be there soon but still just look amateur, which is about how I feel about Google and AI overall. I know the models have improved but I still have a bad taste in my mouth from testing Gemini in the past and I still feel that Google has an overly complicated "how to use our models" that changes way too often. That coupled with "you could lose access to your google account if we don't like what you do with Gemini" means I have little desire to test it out.

On top of all of that I'm completely over announcing a new model that we can't actually play with or try out. I don't think Google is lying about how well their model scored exactly but it still has big "my girlfriend goes to another school, you don't know her"-energy.

If you are going to hyperlink, maybe make sure that your model is actually on the page.

Also, the screen reader has a bug ([[duration]] minutes instead of the actual value) and you have once again announced a model we cannot use.

Edit: Both have been fixed after posting this. Maybe a Gemini 4 Carbon Agent has read and fixed the screen reader bug xD

I cannot fathom what motivates a lab, whose releases for the last year haven't been competitive, to shoot themselves in the foot like this. All this does is make it easier for competitors to snipe your actual launch, even if there was potential with this model (doubtful given 4 Argon, 3.1 Pro and 3 Pro), now everyone knows what exactly they need to release eval results wise to beat Carbon. There is this old idea of "Your competitor always is the first to have an idea what your next product will do", but in this case, Anthropic and co don't even need to guess, they got specific numbers to target.

Announce your models the moment they are available on API and in the subscription for all paying subscription users (cough Argon cough), stop with the cryptic tweets to drum up hype you know full well you won't live up to and make models that tool call, task adhere, task infer and handle long context tasks well beyond simple back-and-forth, chat style prompting. Reminder, during Ox Alpha, actual Google employees implied that was their model. How is this something anyone would believe is a good idea and how are they still allowed to tweet anything after? Please, stop that, it isn't helpful.

If frontier isn't your thing, stop wasting money on moonshot pre-train runs, fund research and open weight via Gemma and sell your inference hardware to other labs, that's far more lucrative anyway, as seen with Colossus 1.

[0] https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/artificial-analysi...

Does their Pro plan have similar limits to OAIs $100 business plan for example?

Any equivalent for the 20x plans?

I find that particular service very very expensive for us to use.

It has better tuning towards not adding unhelpful caveats and irrelevant details. When I told it I was unhappy with some slop being dumped into some repo markdown files from Astra and Sol it actually went ahead and tastefully cleaned them up in line with how I expected them to be. Reductions are normally so bad from agents.

One big thing is that it really feels like talking to someone smarter than me. Other agents just seem extremely knowledgeable but Argon felt smart.

Any bad actor worth their salt is already a) going to have the weights downloaded, forever, to various models that are good at hacking and b) is out of reach of the U.S. government anyways. A ban on open weight models, plus paternalistic gatekeepers of cyber models like the big labs, just opens up Americans and American companies and municipalities to hacking from abroad. Or I guess to a really nice racket where only the big labs can offer a “we’ll continuously monitor and improve your cybersecurity for millions of dollars a year”.

“We're taking a deliberate approach to rollout and are actively engaged in the U.S. government’s voluntary process for pre-release model testing. Starting this week, we will make Carbon available to a subset of cyber defenders and will gradually phase access to additional trusted partners through our Fairwind Program. We’re continuing to gather feedback and iterate on guardrails before making Carbon available to developers, businesses, and consumers via our product surfaces as soon as possible.”

Next: Silver, then Iodine

Slowly spelling out ARC-AGI

Barium > Argon > Carbon

Why is carbon then more capable?

OpenAI: astral objects, bigger = better.

Anthropic: more pretentious = better.

Google: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But damn, is (talking about) releasing a new SOTA model two weeks after the previous one stupid. Do they not plan these things? Argon shouldn't be released at all if you're going to put out "argon 1.1" few weeks later.

When I mention a preference for brevity in a comment offhand and it snowballs into a rule 8 sessions down the road in a PR review that requests the removal of 90% of a colleague's docstrings.

I can't imagine all the "push back" on the "load bearing" Code of Conduct from their corporate foundation documents.

What's next Krypton?

you can definitely tell new people are in charge at deepmind based on the change in naming

> [Header image is a chunk of ice]

???

What happens when all the good names are taken from the periodic table of elements?

I have registered calcium, helium, and californium for my California-based LLM.

Silicon Valley Clowns...

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.

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.

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.

Come on googs!

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.

Wow. This huge. An AI company actually just said 'fabrication' instead of 'hallucination'. AI bubble about to burst...