Google is way more risk adverse than the smaller labs, because the punishment for slip ups is dramatic.

They cut down 1.5sq miles of man made logging forest that was rezoned to industrial land (and sold to google), without getting the right permit first, and it's been international news for almost a month. Anthropic and OAI are still small fish, at least publicly, so they can get away with far more. If Gemini was doing the shit OAI was doing with agent hacks and the like, there would be congressional hearings and $10B in european fines.

When you are a megacorp, perhaps here even the megacorp, every mistake you make is worth millions to someone, the government, the media, individuals, or all of them

I think Artificialanalysis should have a policy of only including available models or something. They already include Gemini 4 Carbon now even though nobody can access it. Google can celebrate that they have the highest scoring model. Fable 5.5 and Astra 6.1 will probably be released before Gemini 4 Carbon and might well outperform it...

I’m not a big fan of their trend of talking about having released a model and then it being unavailable for paid AI plus subscribers for months.

"A while" being too weeks?

It used to be common for a hardware product to be announced a year in advance. And software products too - it's not like Microsoft only started talking about Windows 95 after it became available in the stores, is it?

Cyberpunk 2077 was announced 8 years before it was released.

I have stopped even clicking on their launch links.. it's always something that's not available right now or 'not yet available in your country'..

Anyone can promise the moon in the future.

Especially since at least to me, Argon is a clear tier below current Claude and Sol.

This let's them talk about it on their earnings call in a few hours.

Yup, no way to tell if this carbon is a diamond or just coal.

It does seem like a very uncompetitive approach.

"I have a girlfriend, you just won't know her because she goes to another school"-type energy.

Everything at Google rolls out incrementally to different populations of users so no matter what feature they are announcing there is a good chance you can't see it yet. When they announced Gemini 4 Argon it was 2 days before I could use it.

[dead]

Deepmind creates these, Google Cloud productizes them.

If Google Cloud was in charge, Gemini 5 would be public, and they wouldn't be messing with Gemini 4 nor 1M context when they have 10M internal. C'est la vie.